[Marxism] Re: The Looting of Asia: Gold Warriors

["stolz" <stolz@xxxxxxx>]

*****   Chalmers Johnson, "The Looting of Asia"
LRB 25.22 (20 November 2003)

Gold Warriors: America's Secret Recovery of Yamashita's Gold by
Sterling Seagrave and Peggy Seagrave | Verso, 332 pp, Ј17.00

It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis
aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it
victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million
Russians; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos,
Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23
million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries
they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more,
over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved
millions and exploited them as forced labourers - and, in the case of
the Japanese, as prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a
Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or
Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 per cent chance of not
surviving the war; the death rate for Allied POWs held by the
Japanese was nearly 30 per cent.
----------

Stolz: To this list of self-congratulations I would add the millions of German
and Japanese civilians killed by criminal US-British  carpet bombings of
cities and the atomic bombs.  More importantly, German and Japanese
imperialisms are
paragons of humanity in comparison with the genocidal rage of their more
fortunate rivals, who since 1492 have exterminated hundreds of millions of
people and continue doing so by economic and military-political  means.

------------

The real differences between the two nations, however, developed in
the years and decades after 1945. Survivors and relatives of victims
of the Holocaust have worked for almost six decades to win
compensation from German corporations for slave labour and to regain
possession of works of art stolen from their homes and offices.
Litigation continues against Swiss banks that hid much of the Nazi
loot. As recently as July 2001, the Austrian Government began to
disburse some $300 million out of an endowment of almost $500 million
to more than 100,000 former slave labourers. The German Government
has long recognised that, in order to re-establish relations of
mutual respect with the countries it pillaged, serious gestures
towards restitution are necessary. It has so far paid more than $45
billion in compensation and reparations. Japan, on the other hand,
has given its victims a mere $3 billion, while giving its own
nationals around $400 billion in compensation for war losses.
--------------------

Stolz: Most of these restitutions appear to reflect the new power of Jewish
bourgeoisie who now has its own ethnic state, a US "strategic"
partner, and, even more importantly, become admitted to the white
establishement of Western imperialism, from which it was largely excluded
before WWII.   Nobody is talking, of course, of restitution to millions of
non-Jewish Soviet citizens murdered, maimed and enslaved by the Nazis.
-----------------

More significant, however, are differences in US Government policies
towards the two countries. From the moment of Germany's defeat, the
United States was active in apprehending war criminals, denazifying
German society, and collecting and protecting archives of the Nazi
regime, all of which have by now been declassified.
-------------------
Stolz:  This is just more of the same snow job.  The United States became not
only the most notorious protector of nazi criminals ,but their most generous
employer.  Suffice to say that the CIA had hired virtually the entire Nazi spy
network in Eastern Europe led by General Reinhard Gehlen.  In the first years
of Cold War Gehlen enlisted thousands of former SS and Gestapo for subversive
operations again the Soviet Union and new people's democracies in Eastern
Europe. later, on the order of their American bosses Gehlen's thugs organized
terror and genocide in Latin America.

The US "denazification" of  West Germany was mostly a lip service
to the public opinion in Europe and US.  People like Adenauer came from the
rabbidly anticommunist and racist conservative circles who were responsible
for the rise of the Nazis, in the first place, and stood 100% behind their
Drang nach Osten, as they did later behind Nato.

Vadim Stolz