Abe: Too much of a willing tool for US imperial designs in the Far East.

Peter Symonds, wsws.org

Nearly seven decades after the end of World II, the right-wing government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe is rapidly remilitarising Japan, freeing its armed forces from any legal or constitutional constraints and revising history to whitewash the past crimes and atrocities of Japanese imperialism.

Abe has been engaged in an ideological offensive that was marked by his visit December 26 to the notorious Yasukuni Shrine to Japan’s war dead, including 14 convicted class A war criminals. The same month, he appointed four right-wing figures to the board of governors of Japan’s public broadcaster NHK in order to shift its political orientation.

The purpose of the appointments has quickly become apparent. In late January, the new NHK chairman, Katsuto Momii, triggered a public furore by justifying the systematic abuse of hundreds of thousands of women as sex slaves by the Imperial Army in the 1930s and 1940s. Momii apologised for expressing his private view in his role as chairman, but did not retract the remarks.

This week, another Abe appointee, Naoki Hyakuta, declared that the Rape of Nanking, one of the worst atrocities of the twentieth century, “never happened.”

In 1937, Japanese troops entered the city and over a period of weeks engaged in an orgy of rape, murder and destruction in which up to 300,000 Chinese civilians and soldiers were killed.

Yet Hyakuta claimed that the Nanking massacre was fabricated in order to cover up the crimes of the US in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is an argument that until now has been confined to extreme right-wing fringe groups. They justify the horrific crimes of Japanese imperialism in the 1930s and 1940s by pointing to those of US imperialism during World War II.

The denial of crimes on the scale of the Rape of Nanking has only one meaning—it is the ideological preparation for new wars and new atrocities.

The Japanese government is not alone. Five years after the eruption of the 2008 global financial crisis, capitalism is mired in economic slump and financial turmoil, fuelling inter-imperialist rivalries, neo-colonial interventions and diplomatic intrigues in every corner of the world.

It is no accident that as Abe is refurbishing Japanese militarism, the new grand coalition government in Germany is repudiating its previous policy of military restraint. Nor is the Japanese government the only one rewriting history. The British and Australian governments, among others, are seizing on the anniversary of World War I to glorify the bloodbath that claimed the lives of millions in the inter-imperialist struggle for colonies, markets and strategic dominance.

The chief destabilising factor in world politics is the eruption of US militarism. US-led neo-colonial interventions have devastated Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. Now, in the name of Obama’s “pivot to Asia”, the US is engaged in an all-out diplomatic offensive to undermine China and encircle it militarily.

The Obama administration is responsible for encouraging Japan to take a more aggressive stand against China, creating a dangerous new flashpoint in the East China Sea—the disputed Senkaku/Diaoyu islands. Yesterday, US Secretary of State John Kerry met with his Japanese counterpart and affirmed again that Washington would back Tokyo in a war with Beijing over the rocky, uninhabited outcrops.

Having pressed Japan to remilitarise, the US has set political forces in motion that it does not control. The Abe government, while affirming the US-Japan alliance, is determined to defend the interests of Japanese imperialism.

Since coming to power in December 2012, Abe has boosted the military budget and established a National Security Council to concentrate foreign and defence policy in his hands. He is pushing to end constitutional restraints on the involvement of the armed forces in aggressive wars.

This revival of militarism is both to prosecute the interests of Japanese imperialism abroad and project outwards, against a foreign “enemy”, the tensions produced by the growing social crisis at home. Abe came to power promising to end two decades of deflation and economic stagnation. However, his “Abenomics” has proven to be a chimera, boosting share markets but failing to produce sustained growth.

Abe set out his agenda very clearly at the World Economic Forum at Davos last month. He made clear that Japanese imperialism was not about to relinquish its position as a leading power in Asia.

Dismissing those who described Japan as the “land of the setting sun”, Abe insisted that “a new dawn” was breaking. His portrayal of China as an aggressive new power comparable to Germany prior to World War I went hand-in-hand with an outline of pro-market restructuring designed to turn Japan into one of the “most business-friendly places in the world.”

There is no significant opposition in the Japanese political establishment to Abe’s rightward lurch to militarism. While voicing tepid criticisms of the government, the opposition Democratic Party of Japan, along with the Japanese Communist Party, fully backs Japan’s claims to the disputed islands in the East China Sea—the central issue in mounting tensions with China.

The working class, however, has a long history of opposition to Japanese militarism. The crimes of the wartime regime in the 1930s and 1940s were not confined to atrocities abroad such as the Nanking massacre. The Tokkō, or “thought police”, were as ruthless as the Nazi Gestapo in Germany in eliminating all forms of criticism or opposition, especially among workers. Abe’s recently enacted secrecy law provoked widespread opposition in Japan precisely because it recalled the 1925 Peace Preservation Law that greatly expanded the role of the Tokkō.

Abe’s provocative attacks on China, the comments by his NHK appointee denying the Rape of Nanking, and related developments constitute a sharp warning to workers and youth in Japan and every other country. The preparations for war are accompanied by a campaign of lies and jingoism that presages class war against the working class. Workers can halt the drive to war and the assault on their living standards and democratic rights only by unifying their struggles internationally on the basis of a socialist program to put an end to the bankrupt profit system.

Andre Damon, wsws.org

The Black masses and most liberals remain mesmerized by the Obama glitz, refusing to look squarely at the ugliness of his policies.

Today, President Obama will sign a bill to cut $8.7 billion from the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), also known as food stamps, slashing almost $100 per month in benefits for nearly a million households.

The attack on food stamps comes as Obama and the Democrats posture in the run-up to this year’s mid-term elections as opponents of social inequality and defenders of the poor and jobless. Nowhere in the establishment media is the glaring contradiction between what the Democrats say and what they do even discussed.

Obama’s action on food stamps is indicative of the state of politics and the reality of social life in America. It is the second cut in three months to a program that provides minimal assistance for the most vulnerable sections of society. The lie that there is simply no money for basic social programs is repeated even as new reports document the unprecedented rise in the wealth of the financial elite.

The levels of wealth accumulated by a tiny layer of society—in the United States and internationally—are almost unfathomable. A report commissioned by Bloomberg last month found that the world’s 300 richest people (0.000004 percent of the world’s population) had a net wealth of $3.7 trillion in 2013, an increase of $524 billion (13 percent) in one year alone.

Bill Gates, the world’s richest man, saw his wealth soar last year by $15.8 billion, to $78.5 billion. Warren Buffett, awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Obama in 2011, increased his wealth by $12.7 billion, to $60 billion, in 2012. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s wealth nearly doubled, from $11.3 billion to $23 billion.

The astounding growth of the fortunes of the super-rich is tied to a record rise in the stock market, the direct and intended result of government policy. In the US, the Federal Reserve holds interest rates to near-zero and pumps tens of billions of dollars into the financial system every month, a policy copied by central banks in Europe and Japan.

The corporate-financial elite uses its control of the political system to carry out a vast redistribution of wealth. Unlimited funds are made available to the banks and corporations, while governments slash social programs and lay siege to the jobs, wages, pensions and health benefits of working people.

The scope of the attack makes clear that what is involved is a social counterrevolution. Every aspect of social life of the broad masses of people is affected:

Jobs and wages

Permanent mass unemployment is the result of relentless downsizing and cost-cutting by the corporate elite. Nowhere is the assault more ruthless than in America. This week, mass layoffs were announced by Dell, International Paper, Disney, Time Inc. and United Airlines, as well as many corporations based outside the US. Since 2009, wages in the auto industry, which the Obama administration singled out for restructuring, have declined an average of 10 percent, while manufacturing wages as a whole have fallen 2.4 percent. The nominal decline in the unemployment rate is mainly the result of millions of discouraged jobseekers leaving the labor market. The majority of new jobs pay near-poverty wages and provide little or no benefits.

Unemployment benefits, food stamps, social welfare programs

The cuts in food stamps are part of a broader attack on social programs. They follow the expiration of extended jobless benefits for 1.3 million long-term unemployed workers in the US. The percentage of long-term unemployed receiving cash benefits has fallen from two-thirds in 2010 to one-third today. The new bipartisan budget keeps in place $1 trillion in across-the-board “sequester” cuts over the next decade. The Obama administration has reduced domestic discretionary spending as a percentage of the gross domestic product to its lowest level since the 1950s.

Pensions

In the 1980s, 60 percent of full-time private-sector workers age 25 to 64 in the US had a defined-benefit retirement plan. Now, that number has dropped to about 10 percent. Among the last holdouts are municipal employees, who are facing the gutting of their pensions in a wave of municipal bankruptcies. With the support of the Obama administration, a bankruptcy court judge in Detroit has given the go-ahead for overriding state constitutional protections and slashing city workers’ pensions.

Health care

The attack on workers’ pensions is coupled with the introduction of the Affordable Care Act, a “reform” that aims to dismantle the system of employer-sponsored health care and force workers to individually purchase health insurance on the private market. The scheme will cut health care costs for corporations and the government, boost the profits of insurance and health industry companies, and reduce coverage while increasing out-of-pocket costs for tens of millions of workers.

As the social conditions of workers are decimated, corporate deregulation, tax windfalls and government handouts to big business continue unabated.

The latest round of attacks on working people is a continuation of an offensive that has been ongoing for decades. The ruling class responded to the decline in the global economic position of American capitalism with a policy of deindustrialization, financial speculation and wealth redistribution from the bottom to the top. This was intensified following the collapse of the Soviet Union, which the corporate and financial elite saw as lifting a major restraint on the exploitation of the working class at home and imperialist aggression abroad.

The financial collapse of 2008 and the ensuing slump were seized on to further restructure class relations. The result: levels of social inequality that have not been seen since the years prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s.

The staggering growth of social inequality—to the point where less than 100 people control more wealth than the bottom 3.5 billion people on the planet—has destroyed any social basis for democracy. It underlies the preparations of the US and governments around the world for police state forms of rule, as exposed by Edward Snowden’s revelations of mass spying.

What is emerging from the crisis and decay of capitalism is a new form of aristocratic privilege and political reaction. The only alternative is socialism—the expropriation of the wealth of the ruling class, the transformation of the corporations and banks into publicly owned and democratically controlled institutions, and the reorganization of society on the basis of social need, not private profit.

Andre Damon is a senior political writer with the wsws.org, information resource of the Social Equality Party.

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