Richard Jernigan -> RE: American Freedom? (Dec. 17 2012 5:36:55)
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Time to try to come at it, I suppose. As usual, I start with a boring little story. When I was 11 and 12 years old, we lived in Alaska. It was marvelous for a boy that age. My best friend Ivan and I could set out walking after breakfast on Saturday, and before lunch we could be in a place where there was no evidence there had been any human there before us. We could put together our fly rods, dip our flies into a stream and be guaranteed a trout for lunch, garnished with berries from the streamside grove. On longer trips we could see the majesty of the Alaska Range and the stupendous mass of of the great god Denali, which we white people called Mount McKinley. With Ivan's Dad whose professional work took him on long hikes and camping trips, we could penetrate the utter wilderness of the Kenai Peninsula. In those days there were no roads there. We experienced the paralyzing fear, awe and beauty of walking into a clearing among the big trees, only to have two brown bears rear up to their full 10-foot height and start sniffing the breeze to find our direction. No one has to tell you what to do when you see a brown bear up close. You will automatically stand perfectly still, breathe silently, and try not to piss in your pants. Then we moved to Washington, DC. Of course at the beginning of school we had the "stand in front of the class for ten minutes, and tell what you did over the summer." In my previous school I had the top grades in both speaking and writing. My teacher gave me good grades for my talk in Washington. But my new friends were utterly indifferent to what I was so deeply moved by. They were smart kids. They knew their way around a relatively sophisticated city. They went to concerts, art galleries and the theater. But almost all of them had lived there all their lives. They had never seen a real mountain. They had never left home in the morning confident of catching a trout for lunch. Many had never seen a wild rabbit, much less a brown bear that towered over them with huge menace and awful beauty. There was no common experience to base communication upon. If you asked them to define "mountain", they could write it out perfectly. But they had never seen a range of 4,000 meter peaks with deep snow on them all summer long, much less the titanic beauty of Denali, visible from 300 kilometers away. They thought they knew the words, but they didn't know what they meant. I soon stopped talking about Alaska, and set about learning my way around the East Coast. When I came home from combat in Central America, I knew why my father and uncles never spoke about WW II. They weren't ashamed of what they had done, as I was. They were proud that they had successfully defended their country against attack. But they knew that their experiences had been so different, that if they spoke to folks back home about war, it would be senseless babble, or worse yet, terribly misunderstood. Total war is a different state of existence than peace. My parents' generation experienced it firsthand. Not just a few countries. The whole planet was enveloped in the rage and madness of total war. There has never been anything remotely like it since. Shall I describe combat? Sorry, I can't. You would read the words, but would understand them differently, or not at all. So why did I get angry? My generation lived through the war as children. We felt the fear, anger and determination around us. We ourselves feared for our fathers and uncles. My large extended family was very close. I loved my uncles almost as much as my father. We hated the enemies who did their best to kill them, or to capture and torture them, as the Japanese did. After the war many of us kids faced another task, along with our parents: reconciliation. My father went to Japan and met a different kind of people than the ones he, his brother and brothers-in-law had faced in battle. Many of us military kids were soon exposed to our former enemies in person. Guys brought home German and Japanese wives from their tours in the occupations. We played with their kids, and were invited to their houses. Their mothers were nothing like how we pictured their uncles, who had done their very best to kill our fathers. We soon realized our friends' mothers may have been loyal subjects of Der Führer or the Emperor, but now they were not. They were Americans. My task of reconciliation was perhaps a little more intense than some. Thirty-five years after the war was done, I fell in love with a girl who had grown up in Tokyo. My father had tried to kill her mother by setting the city on fire with incendiary bombs. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not the highest single cases of civilian fatality. The fire bombing of Tokyo killed more people right away than either atomic bomb. Atomic victims died by the thousands later from radiation sickness. People in Tokyo starved to death. When my girl and I began to talk of our families, she found out my father had been in the Air Force. She asked if he had anything to do with the fire bombing of Tokyo, which she had heard her mother describe with deep emotion. I started to apologize. She said, "Richard, don't. We started it. If they could have, the militarists would have done the same thing to you." So, who were "the militarists"? Her mother told me. Once when we talked, her mother said to me, apropos of nothing I could see, "I was a member of a generation that was disillusioned with Japan, perhaps more than most. The militarists imprisoned my father. He died in jail." Her father was a prominent physicist who had studied in America. He said publicly that if Japan attacked America, they would lose the war. "The militarists...?" I asked. "While America was tearing itself to pieces and killing millions of their brothers over the question of slavery, Japan was struggling with feudalism. I come from a feudal family." Her great-great grandfather was Yamagata Aritomo, one of the great feudal lords of Choshu. "We were among those who rebelled against the Shogun, and moved to transfer power back to the Emperor in 1867, after the centuries of the Tokugawa Shogunate. There was no intent to dismantle the feudal system. But other elements seized the chance to remove power from the samurai class and the daimyo, my ancestors among them. They could no longer walk through the street with their swords, with the power of life and death over the lower classes. It established the beginnings of modern Japan, for which we may be thankful. But many of the feudal classes went into the military. They were the personal subjects of the Emperor, beyond parliamentary control. Japanese officers still carried the sword, the symbol of the samurai and the daimyo. They no longer held the power of life and death over Japanese merchants and peasants, but you know well that they made sword practice cutting off the heads of prisoners of war. You know your English history. When was the last time when the whole company of an English bodyguard died with their defeated king on the field of battle? "At Maldon, in Essex." "When was that, my friend Richard?" "More than a thousand years ago." "In Japan that ethic was still alive in 1867...and in 1945. Those were the militarists. Those were the descendants of the feudal elite who maneuvered to ever greater power under Meiji's weak son, and who took over the government under the Showa Emperor [Hirohito, Emperor during WWII]. Those were the men who started the war in Manchuria and invaded China. Those were the men whose troops raped Nanking. Those were the men who killed millions in China and bombed the city of Chongqing. Those were the men who foolishly attacked America. Those were the men who killed my father by imprisoning him when he betrayed his class. Those were the men who MacArthur removed from power in the Occupation. Those were the men who made my generation disillusioned with Japan by bringing defeat upon us for the first time since the beginning of the world." She spoke calmly, but the hand that held the antique teacup trembled slightly. I had known her for a little over two years. Though the subject of my father's profession never came up between my girl's mother and me, the Japanese expatriate community in San Francisco was small and relatively tight knit. As I came to understand that community better, I began to suspect her mother may have known my father's profession anyhow. Maybe someone remembered a name from MacArthur's staff. I asked my girl. "It may be, Richard. I don't know. You know I won't bring it up with her. If she does know, she won't bring it up with me. Certainly not with you. Maybe not even with Daddy." "Do you think what she said about the militarists...." "I thought it was her....formal act of forgiveness." She wept for about five seconds, then dried her eyes. "But I don't know for sure. I won't ever know for sure. I will always think it was." It wasn't the last time we wept about what had been done to her family and her country, what had happened to my uncle because of her country attacking mine, what had been done to her father's family by the Nazis, what my family had done in retaliation for her country's attack., how the lives of my father and uncles had been endangered for years at a time by their defense of their unjustly attacked country, and just about the brutality of total war. She asked if it would be appropriate to meet my uncle. I thought about it for at least a week. Then I said, "Yes, he's always been strong, but he's well now. I know you won't do anything..." They got along great. He had a suit he had picked up working at the Salvation Army that fit him perfectly. He looked great. We went to a Kansas City steakhouse. He never drank, but he bought us a bottle of wine. The next time I saw him, he said he liked my girl. "You always like the cute ones,"he said. "But she's a real sweetheart." Without a word being said he knew what she meant by coming to Kansas City to see him. I'll stop now. You don't know what I'm talking about. You never will. At least I hope you never have the experiences that would give you the basis for communication. Millions of those who fought on all sides of the great madness, millions of their children who experienced war at second hand, reconciled. Many of us have a special bond of mutual forgiveness with our former enemies. You have no skin in the game. Leave us in peace, for God's sake. You have no idea what total war is. It is the province of historians. Historians don't sift through the ashes of madness, and say, "Oh, that was evil. This whole country is to be condemned." They view history with all the coolness and precision they can muster. Their emotions are bound to be engaged, but they know that in total war they are dealing with a form of madness. My girl's father visited his only surviving relative, the sister he persuaded to leave Germany when he did. She was a psychiatrist in Buenos Aires. With his thoughtful, gentle, but ironic smile, my girl's father said to me, "I asked her why she chose psychiatry. She said she wanted to try to learn why things went wrong with people's minds. I asked her if she had found out. She said, 'No, but in a few cases I can help with their symptoms.'" Politicians in America are masters of promoting the fake issue. Shortly after the last election I was violently attacked by one of my close relatives for how I had cast my vote. I had resolved not to discuss politics with her, but it had not occurred to me to resolve to lie, saying i had not voted. When I said I couldn't figure out where her candidate stood, she lashed out, "You didn't vote for Obama, did you??? Did You???" Caught flat footed, without a rehearsed lie, i said, "Well, yes." "My God, I thought you were an intelligent man. How could you be so STUPID as to vote for a Muslim communist from Kenya who passed a law permitting partial birth abortion???!!!" She was violently angry, screaming and fuming. Unfortunately all the things she accused the president of were bald faced lies. Absolutely huge bald faced lies. She is an educated woman, who has lived in a foreign country, though it was in the Near East 40 years ago. I love her dearly, but my stomach churns at the thought of meeting her at Christmas time. The fake issue is meant to stir emotions and get people to vote, without addressing the real issues. You no doubt have real issues with America. So do all thinking Americans. I think they deserve an airing, as long as we can refrain from personal attacks. But the Holocaust, the Rape of Nanking, Stalin's killing of millions of kulaks by his intentional famine, the Soviet gulag, the Stasi surveillance of German citizens, Mussolini's colonization of Ethiopia, France's conduct in Indochina, the fire bombing of Tokyo, the British suppression of the Mutiny in India, all these are fake issues for us. The people who did those things are dead. They are not responsible for today's evils, except for the repercussions of their acts that echo down the years of history. All these are useful fields of study for historians, but for today's debates they are fake issues. They stir emotions, but they have nothing to do with the problems at hand. I am not responsible for the gradual Anglo-Saxon conquest of England, the Danish conquest of England, the Norman conquest of England--in all of which my various ancestors played a part. The consequences of these events still reverberate in England today. But they are not indicative of my character. Not even slave owning by two of my great-grandfathers is indicative of my character, though some here would seem to imply that it is. My other two great-grandfathers fought against slavery, at the risk of their lives. How do you score that game? The reverberations of slavery are readily apparent in the demographics of the last presidential vote. But taking the present day residents of Mississippi to task for slavery is a fake issue. Some are still racist, but they are not slave owners, nor do they want to be. I didn't fire bomb Tokyo. My father did. My girl and her mother, who were the victims at first and second hand, forgave him. So did many of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki forgive their attackers. So did my uncle forgive the forces, both American and Japanese, that gave him nightmares and disabling waking flashbacks for years, as he strove to survive as a kind of agnostic monk. It was sad to see him in those days, though I admired his bravery. They finally left him in peace, for the last 20 years of his life. He was a keen observer of the world during those days. My visits to him at the Salvation Army or Goodwill were high points for me. For all those people, for my girl and me, forgiveness was the way forward. But when Deniz put together what my father had been forgiven for, after much pain and grief, and what Hitler had done to my girl's father, he stepped on a land mine. it took the rag off the bush. That's a Texas phrase. Nobody seems to know its literal meaning. It means a sudden flaming rage, often accompanied by physical violence. Deniz had no way of knowing what it meant to me. Fortunately he was not within reach for me to throw a chair at his head. Being a tireless keyboarder, I launched a flaming, sarcastic personal attack, for which I apologized. I regret the attack. I'm not sorry for the rage. End of story. RNJ
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