China is celebrating its victory over Japan in World War II and U.S. officials are having nothing to do with it. While other governments around the world are sending top-level delegations to the celebrations, the U.S. government is boycotting the event.
One reason, no doubt, is that U.S. officials view China as a growing threat to their post-Cold War hopes and dreams to make the United States the sole worldwide imperial force in the world. They view China a “rival,” one that is becoming “assertive.” It isn’t helping that China is having giant military parades as part of its celebration. Maybe they would have been better off just having military flyovers at sporting events, as U.S. military officials do.
But there is another factor at work here. China’s celebration reminds people of one of the many tragic legacies of World War II, namely that the “good war” ended up with China going communist.
Recall what happened.
Japan invaded China in a brutal war of aggression. In response, President Franklin imposed an oil embargo on Japan and froze Japanese bank accounts with the purported aim of liberating the Chinese from the Japanese.
Yet, what ends up happening? At the end of the war, the Chinese are in fact liberated from Japanese rule, only to end up under communist rule a few years later.
That’s the World War II victory that China is celebrating and that U.S. officials are not celebrating.
That’s not the only irony, of course, of the “good war” that killed some 80 million people and maimed and injured countless more.
Consider the war in Europe against Nazi Germany.
Great Britain and France declare war on Germany in order to free the Poles from Nazi tyranny. At the end of the war, Poland was in fact freed from Nazi tyranny, which is why U.S. officials do celebrate “our” World War II victory in that part of the world.
But there’s one big problem there.
While it’s true that the Poles were freed from Nazi tyranny, they ended up spending the next 50 years or so under Soviet communist tyranny. That’s precisely why the Poles don’t celebrate “our” victory in World War II, just as U.S. officials don’t celebrate China’s victory over Japan in World War II.
The way U.S. officials see is that in World War II, the Soviet Union was on “our” side as “our” wartime partner and ally. So, when FDR agreed at the Yalta Conference to deliver Eastern Europe to the Soviets, that was considered to be okay because the Soviet communists were on “our” side.
Was there a difference between living under Nazism and communism? U.S. officials certainly thought so, which is why they celebrate World War II as great victory — at least in Europe. But the Poles and other Eastern Europeans didn’t think so, which is why they never celebrated “our” victory in the “good war.”
But here’s another irony: As soon as the war was over, U.S. officials changed positions. They converted the Soviet Union, which had been Nazi Germany’s enemy, into the official postwar enemy of the United States. That brought the Cold War, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, as well the conversion of the U.S. government into a national-security state, along with a foreign policy of coups, regime-change operations, support of dictatorships, torture, assassinations, wars of aggression, the Pentagon, the CIA, the NSA, the military-industrial complex, and, of course, ever-growing budgets to fund the ever-growing U.S. warfare state.
Indeed, don’t forget that U.S. officials even brought some 1,000 Nazi officials into the U.S. government, secretly of course.
Poland and China weren’t the only countries to fall to the communists as a result of the World War II. There was also Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, and the rest of Eastern Europe, along with the eastern half of Germany.
Returning to FDR’s actions against Japan, the truth is that FDR wasn’t taking those actions against Japan out of love and concern for the Chinese people. He was doing it to involve the United States into World War II, something that he had vowed not to do in his 1940 presidential campaign.
Roosevelt knew that the American people were overwhelmingly opposed to getting involved in another European war, especially since World War I had ended up being a total waste of American life and money.
But FDR wanted into the war and he was determined to flout the will of the American people. The wily politician he was, he knew that the only way he could do that would be by getting either Germany or Japan to “fire the first shot.” In that way, he could exclaim, “We’re innocent! We’ve been attacked! We now have to defend ourselves by getting into the war.”
Germany saw what he was doing and refused to take the bait. Japan was in a different position, however, and Roosevelt knew it. If it didn’t get the oil necessary to run its war machine, its occupation of China was finished.
So, FDR tightened his noose around Japan’s neck, with the aim of getting Japan to attack U.S. forces in Hawaii, the Philippines, or wherever. The troops stationed there, along with their ships, would be bait. Their sacrifice would be for the greater good.
So, in order to break out of the noose that FDR was tightening around its neck, Japan attacked at Pearl Harbor, not as a first step to invade and conquer the United States, as Americans are taught to believe, but as a way to give it free reign in the South Pacific to get oil supplies to fund its war machine. FDR had gotten what he wanted — America’s entry into World War II.
U.S. officials still celebrate the results of World War II in Europe as a great victory, notwithstanding the Soviet communist takeover of Eastern Europe and East Germany. But they obviously find it discomforting to do the same with respect to China.