Germany & Japan versus Russia & the American South

 Many things are good for cultivating a sense of analytical detachment.  Reading and writing are both just generally good, but they are also multipurpose activities.  I do not indulge in the personal in this blog, nor anywhere else, not having social media profiles, yet this morning, I continue to ponder yesterday's actions by an unfortunate shitbag whom I do not have the power to remove from my life.  So what wisdom can be gleaned from observing the behavior of shitbags?

I will return to some of the bigger themes in tomorrow's science fiction/fantasy post, for RF Kuang's The Poppy War, as ideas connect to ideas, but here is the core observation.

There are circumstances when conflict can be resolved, and circumstances when it cannot, and continued conflict is inevitable.  "Two sides to every story, blame on both sides, blah, blah," yes, we all know the platitudes, and in some cases, conflicts can be described in this way without doing damage to empirical reality, but frequently, this is not the case.  Sometimes, it's just good-versus-evil, or at least, one side is so clearly the villain that even if the other side isn't pure good, pointing that out is a dodge to avoid admitting the villainy of who is really at fault, and that's basically where I'm going here.

Nobody ever has been, or ever will be pure good.  Hence, to observe that one side is not pure good is of variable relevance when describing any conflict.  Consider WWII.  Consider Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  There is a division in the modern left on whether or not to give him a pass for the structure of the New Deal Coalition, and what he needed to do to maintain it, which was basically letting the South have their way on race and segregation.  In exchange for that devil's bargain, Roosevelt got, well, the New Deal.  But at least that was a deal that was struck, knowing how morally fraught it was.

On the other hand, consider the internment of Japanese-Americans.  The nicest thing anyone can say about it is that, well, Roosevelt's camps weren't extermination camps, which is what we call, "the lowest bar ever."  Basically, that was about the worst thing any president has done since we outlawed slavery.

If you're honest, that was even worse than what Trump did.  We were worried that Trump was going to pull shit like that.  Roosevelt actually did it.  But, the left kind of forgives him because he also did the New Deal, and oh yeah, eventually got around to fighting Germany and Japan.

Roosevelt was a morally complex figure, whose record was mixed.  None of which does anything to change the fact that Germany and Japan were the bad guys.  Period.  I'm not going to bother to elaborate on that.  I'm going to take a brave stance and say that Germany and Japan were the bad guys in WWII, and I'm glad that the Allies fought and won.

Yet history is not a thing that ends.  But maybe once, and fortunately not yet.  History just keeps on a-happenin', and y'all know what happened in the following years and decades with Germany and Japan.  They turned into... the good guys.  OK, it took the fall of the Soviet Union for German Unification, and yes, there was that strange period in the 1980s when economic isolationists and mercantilist xenophobes worried that Japan's tech growth would mean we'd all live under Japanese rule anyway, but that was always stupid.  Could I take issue with, say, Germany's response to the financial crisis?  Yes, but at the end of the day, right now, Germany and Japan are standing on the side of democracy in the great international war between democracy and autocracy.

On the other hand, there's Russia.  Russia never turned into the good guys.  Never.  They flirted with the idea when communism collapsed, but after a few years, they said no, we're sticking with evil.  We don't need the communism, but we'll keep the evil, thanks.

And to be clear, I don't just mean Vladimir Putin.  I do mean the Russian people.  The populace.  The citizenry.  I have made this observation before, and it is worth stating again, but first, remember where Putin stands in Russia.  (In an empty room, at the end of a long table, like a coward.)  He is popular.  He has not competed in open elections, but if he did, he would win easily.  He has achieved popularity through demagoguery, warmongering, persecution of minorities like the LGBTQ population, and while the state-run media have feed the Russian people a steady diet of lies for years, I will soon return to an important observation, and actually, one I noted from a great novel by Emily St. John Mandel (The Glass Hotel).  Anyone taken in by obvious, transparent lies wanted to be conned.

The Russian people do not live in a democracy, but they are responsible.  This is not on one man, Vladimir Putin.  This is on the people of Russia.  Who are the bad guys.  As much as the people who voted for Adolph Hitler, the Russian people are the bad guys.

And that means Russia is still the villain.

So I turn to the American South.  My disaffection with the current state of American politics would be clear to the hypothetical reader of this pretentious, little blog, should any such hypothetical reader exist, but at this point, the problems are not quite symmetric.  I don't like either party, but the South has been a problem since the Civil War.  They never made a good-guy turn, and they're still the bigger villains on a political scene that is uncomfortable for someone who just wants bigger-picture, data-driven policy without the lunacy.  One of the more famously illuminating moments came during Shelby County when the conservatives on the Court objected to the notion that the South is still more racist than the rest of the country, but the thing is, this is measurable, and yes, they really are.  And there are political implications.  Look, I've been bashing critical race theory, Nikole Hannah-Jones, and other nonsense, but at the end of the day, a racist is a racist is a racist, and the South has more than just those three.  And without that, it would be hard to have presidents like the Birther In Chief.

Who tried to overthrow democracy.

And has his base-- the South-- which made war on the United States in its attempt to secede for the preservation of slavery-- convinced of the battiest conspiracy theories ever, ready to steal the next election, and perhaps take up arms if they fail.

They never made the good guy turn.

Germany and Japan.

Russia, and the South.

Germany and Japan accepted responsibility.  Germany has some speech laws that I don't like, free speech absolutist that I am.  The Holocaust is kind of a big deal to me.  I can joke about it, but check with your local mohel before you attempt it.  In Germany, you are legally prohibited from denying the Holocaust.  I'm not cool with that.  I remember the good, old days, before the ACLU went woke, when they defended the neo-nazis' speech rights, and would even assign jewish lawyers to argue the case, just to make the shitbags' heads explode, like at the end of Raiders.

Still, Germany got that they were wrong.  We sort of have a worldwide agreement that Germany doesn't get to have a military buildup anymore.  Japanese response to WWII has been a little different.  Japan did a lot of vile shit, which has been somewhat overshadowed.  It's kind of like how Dickey Betts was a great guitarist, but since he was in a band with Duane Allman, he didn't get the recognition he deserved.  It's like that, but, you know, for unspeakable evil.

Am I allowed to make that joke?  Someone Chinese could definitely make that joke, given what Japan did to China in WWII, and I'll talk about that tomorrow, but I'm not actually sure this is my territory here.  I've got Duane, they've got Dickey.

That was crass again, wasn't it?

(Ukrainian:  Ve had Hendrix [rolled 'r'].  His name vas Stalin.)

Anyway, point being, Germany and Japan basically said OK, yeah we're now functionally protectorates of the United States.  No more militaries for us, we get it.  We're going to educate our people, build up our economies and join the modern world.

And they did!  Which is why we spent four years looking at Angela Merkel as one of the leaders of the free world, standing up to Donald Trump, whose electoral base was in shithole countries, like Mississippi.

The Soviet Union broke apart, and some of the republics joined the modern world.  Like... Ukraine.  Russia, which was the center of the Soviet Union, never did the mea culpa.  Putin's whole schtick is the belief that the Soviet Union was good, not because of communism, but because of the empire.  He didn't even believe in the economic ideology.  For him, the evil empire was the point.

And for Russia, the evil empire is the point.  Without the mea culpa, without the acknowledgement that they were wrong, that they were the villains, the bad guys, the problem, the destabilizing force in the world, oppressing within and outside, it just goes on, and on.

Russia cannot be salvaged as a country unless Russia comes to grips with the fact that it has been the villain for 100 years.  Yes, there was another villain in the intervening period, but Hitler does not excuse Stalin.  See above.  Stalin actually beat Hitler in the body count contest.

And without facing up to history, Russia will always be the villain, not just because facing what they have done is necessary, but because an unwillingness to do so is exactly the problem.  That's the point.  The thing.  The evil.  The core.

So we turn to the American South.  To the degree that any historical evil matches the Holocaust, y'all made a run for the title.  Terms like "national reckoning on race" just make me cringe, but here's the straight deal.  We have a revisionist history problem and it is geographically based because the American South has never wanted to face up to the fact that they were the villains.

Blah, blah, there were some slaves in the North at various times, blah, blah, trade, blah fucking blah.  I have a zero tolerance policy for revisionist history.  We have these things called "Declarations."  Independence and Secession.  The former tells you why we seceded from Britain, and the latter tell you why the Confederate states seceded from the Union.  What do they say?  Big, long laundry list in the former case, and in the latter, mostly... slavery.  They wanted their slaves.

Fortunately, they lost.

However, the South never gave up their sense of grievance.  (Sound familiar?)  They wanted to tell a story about them having been the good guys, which required rewriting history, and ignoring those declarations.  So blah, blah, states' rights, blah, blah, "war of Northern aggression," yadda-fucking-yadda.  And then to complete the square, Nikole Hannah-Jones comes along and claims, contrary to the Declaration of Independence and all historical documentation, that the Revolutionary War was fought to preserve slavery, and we're told to pretend that she isn't just is much of a revisionist as the neo-confederate liars.

Sidetrack.

Anyway, point being, the South never faced up to having been the villains.  This matters.  My disdain for modern American politics would be on display to any hypothetical reader of this pretentious, little blog, in the hypothetical case that anyone read it, which is purely hypothetical, and my frustration with the growing lunacy of the left is nowhere greater than on issues like critical race theory, but if we're being honest about race and the South, there are still a lot of unreconstructed racists there.  And those attitudes still matter.

See:  Trump, Donald.  He would never have become president without birtherism, which is the rawest form of racism we have seen in decades.  Where is Trump's base of support?  What do those people think and say about the Civil War?  This is all connected, empirically, statistically.  We're still playing out the Civil War.  I find more interest in the political scientists who crunch the numbers at the individual level rather than the county-level analysis, which is basically willful commission of the ecological inference fallacy, but the reason we keep doing the analysis is that we're still fighting the Civil War.

Because the South never 'fessed up.  They're still nursing that grievance, that "the South shall rise again!" thing.  Denying that the Civil War was even about slavery!

How could the nation ever truly heal without that?!

It couldn't.  This is where the aggrieved, white Southerner tells stories of punitive reconstruction-era policies in order to deflect from that, you know, slavery thing.  Why?

You didn't even do it!  It wasn't even you!  Literally every single person involved in American slavery is dead, and so are their parents going back generations!*  That's why the attempts to construct a defense of "reparations" jump through all sorts of weird, rhetorical hoops.  Dude, it wasn't you, so why are you defending them?!

That's a whole, other thing, and I'm not going to attempt it this morning.  Rather, I shall simply observe a refusal to accept blame, for one's ancestors and forebears.

If you find an atrocity committed by anyone back in my family line, my country, "group," whatever, and present that to me, I officially don't give a shit.  It is not my responsibility because I didn't do it, and I will make no attempt to defend my forebears because their deeds are not my responsibility.  It works both ways.

Yet acknowledging that an atrocity happened?  That matters.  Acknowledging whodunnit?  That matters.  It matters most when they are still around.  If that doesn't happen, then long after, the refusal will persist in the form of revisionist history (see: the American South), with its own toxic consequences, but notice the compare-and-contrast.

Germany and Japan faced the music.

Russia never faced their own villainy.  The American South never faced their own villainy.

Germany and Japan became allies of democracy and world progress.  Russia began the first land war in Europe since WWII.  They also meddled in our elections on behalf of Donald Trump, with his electoral base in the American South, rooted in racist appeals that stem from a refusal to accept the truth of the Civil War.

Accepting responsibility.  Blah, blah, two sides, something about tangoing, but I can't dance, and I never could.  Sometimes, one side really is just in the wrong.  If that side refuses to take responsibility, no resolution is possible.  Period.  In world affairs, that means repeated conflicts are inevitable.

In life, if you can excise this kind of person from your life, do so.  I'm a big fan of the books-not-people approach to constructing one's life, but there's only so far one can go, and by the numbers, you're going to encounter a subhuman piece of shit or two.  The best you can do is minimize your interaction, and try to find peace elsewhere because those who refuse to take responsibility seek conflict, and those who seek conflict inevitably find it.

Gov't Mule, "Time To Confess."  This is a live version of the studio cut from Vol. 2 of The Deep End.  As a side note, Haynes was a longtime member of the Allman Brothers, first playing alongside Dickey, then Derek Trucks.

*There is human trafficking, and it meets the definition of slavery.  I don't want to duck the issue, I'm just limiting my discussion to the triangle trade, and the legal institution of slavery.