Re: Thatcher and nationalism

[Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1@xxxxxxx>]

> Brad De Long wrote:
>
> > > Well this might be nice if nations intervened in other countries when bad
> > > things are done and were able to stop the bad things happening...
> >
> > It was called World War II...
>
> Yeah, and after the war, the U.S. assimilated most of the Nazi
> intelligence apparatus. They had such excellent files on the
> Russkis, you know.
>
> Doug

In the East, even _before_ the WWII was over, Western imperialists
were already fighting, together with the Japanese, against the
Communists:

*****   VJ Day: Remembering the Pacific War

Stephen R. Shalom


...As early as February 1944, the Department of State had endorsed
the idea that the East Indies should be given back to the
Netherlands.114 The Indonesian people, however, were not inclined to
accept continued colonial rule, so when British troops arrived --
designated by Washington as responsible for disarming the Japanese
forces there -- they found an armed independence movement. Journalist
Harold Isaacs described how the British dealt with this problem:

Japanese troops, kept under arms, were ordered into action against
the insurgents. At Semarang and Bandung, where bitter battles were
fought to take those cities away from the Indonesians, Japanese
infantry and tanks carried the main brunt. In his official report on
the fighting at Semarang at the end of November, the local British
commander ... gave the late enemy his enthusiastic accolade: "The
Japanese were magnificent!" he wired.115

The British also used their own forces against the Indonesians. The
latter appealed to the United States that the British were using U.S.
weapons and equipment against them. "Washington promptly asked the
British if they would not please remove the American insignia and the
initials 'USA' from their fighting gear," Isaacs reported.116

When the Dutch returned, they were armed with weapons purchased with
U.S. financial aid. The United Nations worked out a compromise
between the Indonesian nationalists and the Dutch, but the Dutch
refused to abide by it and Washington failed to enforce its
implementation. In defiance of the UN, the Dutch imposed a strict
economic blockade on Indonesia, cutting off supplies of food and
medicine and causing great suffering. Then, in 1948, Indonesian
leftists (with no backing from Moscow) tried to take power and when
Sukarno and the other moderate nationalists crushed them, Washington
did some rethinking. Because Sukarno seemed firmly anti-communist,
and to forestall any further radicalization of Indonesian
nationalism, the United States now pressed the Netherlands to settle.
But Washington did support the Dutch in their demand that Indonesia
shoulder the entire burden of its internal debt, 42% of which had
been incurred by Dutch military operations to prevent Indonesian
independence.117 Over the next decade independent Indonesia would be
subject to a massive U.S. campaign of subversion.118

In Indochina, too, Japanese troops and U.S. arms were used to try to
restore colonial rule over a nationalist movement that was prepared
to declare independence. When the British landed in Vietnam, the
first thing they did was free the French forces who had been
imprisoned by the Japanese. Then, the British and French, with
Japanese troops assisting, went out to crush the Vietnamese.119 A
British spokesperson had the "highest praise" for the cooperation
shown by the Japanese commander. Eight weeks after the British
arrived, fewer than 5% of Japanese troops had been disarmed.120

Because the nationalists in Vietnam were communist led, the United
States did not push the French to agree to independence. Over the
next eight years, the French war to reassert its colonial rule over
Indochina would be four- fifths funded by Washington. Thus, even
though it had been the Japanese advance into Indochina that
precipitated U.S. sanctions in 1940-41, ultimately leading to the
Pacific War, the self-determination of the people of Indochina was of
no consequence to the United States. Indeed, as the next two decades
would show, the very lives of the people of Indochina mattered little
to U.S. policy makers.

In the Philippines, the bulk of the pre-war elite had collaborated
with the Japanese, while many Filipinos fought in guerrilla units
against the Japanese occupation. Some of these guerrillas were
American led, but the largest grouping was the left-wing Hukbalahap
(Huks) which drew its strength from the radicalized peasantry of
Central Luzon. When U.S. troops reconquered the islands, they
re-installed the old elite and secured from them vast military bases
and economic privileges. In return, the elite obtained preferential
access to the U.S. market and military aid to help them reassert
their control in the countryside against the Huks.121

Matters were no better in East Asia. Korea had been a Japanese colony
since the early years of the century and the popular desire there for
independence was intense. Herbert Hoover, the former president
welcomed as an adviser by Truman, privately proposed in 1945 that
Japan be allowed to retain Korea and Formosa, making Japan a bulwark
against communism,122 but no U.S. official could endorse the idea of
maintaining Japanese colonialism. (When the Korean war began in 1950,
however, Truman suggested declaring Taiwan part of Japan,123 and in
1966 historian Herbert Feis wrote that it would have been better to
allow Japan to keep Formosa.124) Nevertheless, when U.S. troops moved
into the southern half of Korea -- as per their agreement with the
Soviet Union, whose troops occupied the north -- they preserved the
old regime.

At first Koreans were told that the colonial government would
continue to function with all of its Japanese and Korean personnel,
including the Japanese Governor-General.125 Japanese soldiers wearing
armbands that said "USMG" -- United States Military Government --
patrolled the streets.126 Amidst Korean outrage, Washington and
MacArthur soon ordered the U.S. commander on the spot to remove the
Japanese officials, which he did,127 but U.S. personnel then called
on the Japanese officials as informal advisors.128 Many Koreans who
had served in the colonial bureaucracy were retained. Every Korean
who worked for the Japanese Bureau of Justice was kept on,129 and the
national police -- a particularly oppressive institution under the
Japanese -- continued to be led by officers who had served in the
colonial force.130 U.S. officials admitted that there was enough
evidence to hang the two top leaders of the national police several
times over, but they were not removed. A measure of the popularity of
the U.S. occupation was that more police were needed to keep order in
southern Korea than in the whole of Korea under Japanese rule.131

Utilizing the Japanese colonial structures was not an oversight on
the part of the United States. It was the only way to block the
emergence of a left-wing government in the south, which had the
backing of a majority of the population.132 The result, of course,
was the establishment of a reactionary dictatorship in the south,
leading to civil war in the south and then war/civil war with the
north with casualties in the millions.

In China, the defeat of Japan left a raging civil war between Chiang
Kai- shek's "Nationalist" government and the Communists. The United
States promptly determined to intervene in this civil war. Truman
instructed Japanese troops outside of Manchuria to surrender only to
Nationalist forces and not to the Communists. U.S. aircraft and ships
then ferried KMT troops to the north of China as rapidly as
possible.133 Some Japanese units joined the KMT in its battle with
the Communists; most were repatriated during 1946, but a few fought
with Chiang until the end of China's civil war in 1949.134 Washington
deployed more than 50,000 of its own marines to China, ostensibly to
deport Japanese troops and civilians back home, but in fact to hold
key communication and transportation routes while Chiang consolidated
his hold.135 The last U.S. marines didn't leave China until mid-1949,
and a 1000-strong U.S. army unit provided training to Chiang's forces
until the end of 1948.136 In addition, vast amounts of U.S. economic
and military aid flowed to the KMT until they were driven from the
mainland by Mao's armies....

<http://csf.colorado.edu/bcas/otherart/shalom2.htm>   *****

Yoshie