Review of a review, or indictment of a reviewer
(Note: events leading up to this are set out in my previous post, http://fpb.livejournal.com/570522.html)
The review begins by quoting a nasty little anecdote from 1864:
In December of 1864, an audience in a Denver theater applauded wildly as on stage an ordained Methodist minister displayed the results of the latest encounter between the civilized races and the Others. The minister’s name was John Chivington-Preacher John. Preacher John was a volunteer in the cavalry. Days earlier, he had led an attacking party to Sand Creek, Colorado, where they had surprised and massacred at least 150 Indian children, women, and old men. The braves had been away hunting.
What elicited the roars of approval from the Denver theater audience was not just Preacher John’s tale of "victory" but the grisly evidence. A pile of hacked Indian penises brought laughter. Applause greeted American soldiers who displayed hats over which they had stretched the vaginal skin of Indian women.
None of Denver’s civilized residents saw much wrong with this. No one was ever charged with any wrongdoing. The grateful people of Denver made Preacher John a deputy sheriff, a job he held until he died peacefully in his sleep forty-eight years later at the age of seventy-one.
Let me start from the suspicious lack of context in this account, which seems deliberately edited to leave out the very reasons for the public to behave as they did. Was this, as the author implies, a display of hatred at Indians in general; or was it rather aimed at that particular band? and if so, what had that particular band done to deserve such hatred? (The savagery of Indian methods of warfare is not an invention of white propaganda. The Dakota writer Ohyesa, a.k.a. Charles A. Eastman, confirmed it in detail in his accounts of Dakota life and tried to justify it: "The killing in war of non-combatants, such as women and children, is partly explained by the fact that in savage life the woman without husband or protector is in pitiable case, and it was supposed that the spirit of the warrior would be better content if no widow and orphans were left to suffer want, as well as to weep" - The Soul of the Indian, chapter 4, Gutenberg Project. In the same chapter he asserts that the vicious "dance" practices amounting to self-torture were recent innovations, a justification I don't believe.) That the author has obviously edited the story to mean what he wants it to mean makes me suspect that there was something peculiar about that particular war-band that made its destruction, by whatever means, a welcome piece of news.
Bradley also implies that Preacher John was made a deputy sheriff, and remained one all his life long, because of that one episode, and for no other reason, good or bad. Was he a particularly effective deputy sheriff? Was he highly regarded by law-abiding people? Or was he one of some squalid local power clique, placed in office and kept there at their nod? All these reasons, good or bad, would be a better explanation for Preacher John holding office for so long, certainly better than the notion that a single, particularly bloodthirsty speech had kept ringing in people's ears for decades.
This is the first point. The author is clearly being less than honest with that particular anecdote; and inverarity applauds.
However, I am not interested in that. I may want to look it up at some point, but my point is a great deal more general. Even if the anecdote were honestly presented, even if I was wrong in finding it suspicious and tendentious, even if the Denver men were the murderous rabble, and Preacher John the monster, it wants to describe, still its presentation would be dishonest in a much deeper way. One does not, perhaps, expect an admirer of Richard Dawkins to see it. Someone like inverarity might see nothing strange in the picture of an American Protestant minister in the nineteenth century jumping up and down with enthusiasm at the mass murder of natives; but anyone who knows anything about the history of American Protestantism is bound to be surprised.
To put it simply, the nineteenth century was the golden age of American Protestant mission, and the prime target of American missionaries were, for obvious reasons, their own local heathens - the Indians. To convert Indians had been, in words, a wish-dream, a stated desire, from the days of Jamestown; but until the early nineteenth century, the Protestant churches of Britain and America had not had any structure or personnel dedicated primarily to mission. It was from 1810 on, that, on both sides of the Atlantic, prosperous religious bodies, growing on the increasing wealth of the two countries, found both the impulse and the resources to set up a series of denominational Missionary Societies. These Societies, in general, drew the best of the available personnel - the most ambitious, the hardest-working, bravest and best educated of the clergy of each denomination. It was, after all, dangerous work; work that requires adapting to distant and different communities; work that might lead to a swift and unpleasant end, and sometimes did.
In terms of evangelization, the result was indifferent. But it had a number of important side effects. Much of the best ethnology of the time was produced by missionaries who had spent ten or twenty years with the tribes they described, had learned their language and heart their conversation. And the missionaries also became a formidable lobby for the humane treatment of natives. As early as 1810, the London Missionary Society (Anglican), only just established, was already protesting in Britain over the oppression of blacks in England's newly acquired South African colony. You can't say that the missionaries were slow on the case. It only took 184 years for politics to catch up with the views of missionaries about South African realities.
inverarity, the admirer of the silly Richard Dawkins, seems to find it natural that a Christian preacher should celebrate the butchery of natives; anyone who knows any American history would find it absurd. It would be against the views and precedent of every major denomination, from Catholic to Baptist, from Presbyterian to Mormon. They all were led by their missionaries, and their missionaries were a lobby for natives. And it's not as though the issue were obscure or the material hard to access. One poke in Project Gutenberg delivers more than a hundred items whose subject or title includes the word "missionary", the vast majority of which concern this particular period and place - America, the nineteenth century. Anyone who so wishes can build up a sound historical picture of missionaries in nineteenth-century America without too much effort, and at no expense at all. Bradley did not bother to. He sought out his one odious anecdote and left the matter there. He has slandered by implication the Methodists and other Christians, and inverarity follows him, wagging his tail. The plural of anecdote - as we historians often say - may not be data, but the singular of anecdote, in this case, is certainly blind and brutal prejudice. This isn't just a glib moral equivocation of atrocities taking place decades apart, claims inverarity. Indeed not: it is a glib, misleading and fraudulent moral equivocation of atrocities taking place decades apart, in different continents, in different contexts and for entirely different reasons.
But let's follow Bradley and inverarity's reasoning: a few decades later, those same Americans (or their children, one would think) did terrible things during their invasion of the Filipines, and the Japanese saw and learned. Let us start from this point. To suggest that a nation only learns from the worst of another is repulsive, and insulting to the Japanese themselves. And it involves self-regard of a rare quality. In the picture inverarity delivers, it's all about America - with a token nod to European powers - and what America did to Japan or in Japan's view. Japan was forced out of its centuries-long isolation by American gunboats, built itself into a colonial power just like the colonial powers it was surrounded by, and was a studious observer of how the Americans and Europeans played the imperialism game.
Astonishingly, Bradley claims to be an American patriot. It is possible that he is so steeped in the language of relativism, with its attendant grammar of abuse of anecdotes, that he genuinely does not realize that some vague regard for one's country is not enough to make one a patriot; otherwise KGB general Kim Philby, the lifelong cricket fanatic, Times reader, and most infamous of all traitors, would count as one. Bradley is a moral equivalence merchant; and moral equivalence is not only the enemy of any correct morality, it is also the enemy of any decent patriotism. There would be no point in wanting the country you love to live up to her potential, if you regarded her evils - and heaven knows my country has the Devil's plenty - as no better or worse than the evils of China or Bohemia. If everything is the same and everything is equally bad, I would have no particular reason to want actual evils dealt with, and not much reason to love my country either.
But in this, though nothing like a patriot, he is visibly and spectacularly a nationalist - indeed, a culture imperialist. It's all about us, us - US. That Japan may have chosen those features of Western culture that interested it and rejected others it did not care for - that Japan, in fact, is anything more than the infantile imitator of the deeds of others - does not begin to occur to the writer of this passage, be he Bradley or inverarity. (For as I will show when the time comes, inverarity has certainly pushed Bradley even further down the path of reckless moral equivalence, ignoring large amounts of evidence that Bradley was too honest to drop.) Japan, as a matter of fact, had been intimately involved with European civilization for centuries before the Black Ships of 1854; it had imported European books, learned from European illustration (look up Ukiyo-E), rebuilt its atlases on European models, absorbed as much European knowledge as it could - before America even existed. Dutch ships allowed into Nagasaki always carried loads of books for curious Japanese intellectuals (for this reason Dutch, until 1854, was the best-known European language in Japan, and Japanese printers even printed imitation European prints with Dutch writing). By the time Commodore Perry forced Japan to alter the terms of its dealings with other countries, Japan was as culturally able to deal with the West as any non-Western country. As for the invasion of China being an imitation of Western imperialism, it may have imitated its methods - though it got even those wrong, as I will show in a minute - but anyone who knows anything about Japan should have realized that it was nothing but an ancient Japanese dream. Everyone who has an even passing familiarity with Japanese history knows that the famous Toyotomi Hideyoshi seriously undertook the invasion of Korea and China in the late fifteen hundreds; but he was only resurrecting a previous plan by his predecessor Oda Nobunaga. (And indeed, why not? China had already been conquered several times by bordering nations - Todas, Mongols, and, after Toyotomi's time, Manchus. Why should the Japanese not try? They failed, but that does not mean it was a crazy idea.) Japan's long seclusion behind its own ocean had no doubt also saved Korea and China a lot of trouble, but to ascribe the dreams of Toyotomi and Oda to Western influence is a racist piece of nonsense. Western Imperialism and Western Colonialism are unique, it says. There has never been anything like them in the world before. Any attempt by one country to conquer another can only be caused by imitation of Western Imperialism. And cheese can be found in unlimited quantities on the Moon. (Sorry, Wallace and Gromit.) And incidentally, anyone who imagines that the Fascist Japanese government of the thirties and wartime was a natural and welcome expression of Japanese society has no idea what happened in Japan in the late twenties. The war criminals of the forties were domestic criminals in the twenties and early thirties, making their way by methods similar to the Mafia - intimidation, murder, secret corruption and connivance. There was not even so much of electoral process as placed Mussolini or Hitler in power. Parliamentary government was murdered.
Nobody argues that the American invasion of the Philipines was not a vicious as well as a stupid act. It was a late blossom on a peculiarly ugly period of Western expansion - a period in which people had gone out to conquer not because there was any reason, but because it was the fashion. Italy and Germany went looking for colonies they did not need because all the pink areas on the world's map made Britain look so impressive. The individual adventure of the hideous King Leopold II of Belgium produced what is probably the most criminal government in modern history - the so-called "Free State of Congo" - probably more murderous than Stalin, certainly than Hitler, and for meaner reasons. The fad of conquering for its own sake reached America rather late, when Europe had already partitioned Africa, and produced the useless and cruel result of a colony America did not need, could not defend in case of war (as was clearly shown in 1941-2), and paid dearly to conquer. But this kind of stupidity was not unique: it was the same kind of stupidity that led Italy to invade Ethiopia when it had neither interests there nor any way to defend it against a credible enemy (since it was beyond the Suez Canal and Italy did not control that), or Germany to carve out improbable slices of Africa or Melanesia for no better reason than to get a few Prussian officers to strut in pith helmets and white uniforms.
But to make this typical of "Western Imperialism" is entirely wrong. The growth of the West had gone on for centuries, and, like all empires in all parts of the world, had only one real reason: the West was stronger. It is significant that, except for the Netherlands, the countries that were in the van of early European expansion - Portugal, England, Russia - were outlying and rather weak communities, incapable of taking part in the political struggles of central Europe. They moved outward because stronger communities prevented them from effectively moving inward. Russia reached China and Alaska before it was anything like a serious player in Europe; and at the time in which she was laying the bases for the greatest empire the world has ever known, England was a shattered, leaderless country, shaken by civil wars and Irish and Scottish revolts, and whose policies, especially after Cromwell, were for all practical purposes reduced to an unhappy choice as to whether she wanted to be invaded by France (as Charles II tried in 1670 with the treaty of Dover) or by the Netherlands (as eventually happened in 1688). And yet these countries, little more than ciphers on the European stage, built enormous empires outside Europe. The truth is that because most of the great European powers - France, Austria/Empire, Poland, Sweden, Venice - were chiefly concerned with surviving each other's attentions, the strength they represented was not really understood, inside or outside Europe. But the fact that the three weakest European powers had already by 1700 established empires that stretched across continents just shows how much power was vested in those states, especially France, that had the power to keep the imperial powers out of the continent of Europe. Once that power turned outwards, the rest of the world could do nothing but abide the blast.
Empires arise for one simple reason: that they are the strongest. The origins of that strength may be many and deserve attention, but otherwise the story is always the same. Once the city of Rome had unified the whole peninsula of Italy under its own control, the rest of the Mediterranean was bound to fall under her sway one way or another; there was no power anywhere that commanded comparable resources. The Roman Empire was an inevitability. But the imperialist policies of the Japanese Fascists were not based on any existing strength. Japan in 1939 was not an industrialized country; the industrial colossus we know only started after the war. "In 1938, Toyota only produced 458 cars, Honda 1242, and Datsun 2908." (Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, page 221 and notes.) For all that it had been consistently allocated everything the country could produce, the Japanese army only had one truck for every 49 soldiers - America had one every thirteen. Japan had practically no tanks and no anti-tank weapons, and its troops were still trained in archery and sword-fighting. In terms of weaponry and supply even Italy did better. (And this is a savage remark.) Japan only had a navy, and that because it had spent decades building it up; and that navy was fragile, since, once its capital ships were lost (as they were at Midway), no replacement could quickly be prepared.
In other words, there was no reason to project a Japanese Empire outwards. Japanese ambitions were not really motivated by the real reach and weight of Japanese interest - while all the European empires, including Russia, had been led by commercial penetration and reach - but by jealousy and pride. England and the other European countries had built up great empires in the track of their trade and their finance; Japan wanted one just as big, whether it needed it or not. It is significant that it was only when it was forced to forget this nonsense that Japan really began its climb towards the position of world industrial power.
If there is one lesson that history teaches over and over again, it is that empires arise by chance and strength, not by individual or collective decision. Nobody can get up one morning and say: I intend to build an empire. Those who do, infallibly, suffer either Napoleon's fate or Alexander of Macedon's fate. That is: either they see the whole effort at empire-building and personal glory collapse before their eyes, or they have the good luck to die before all their bloody conquests start to unravel, but their death is the signal for the unravelling. Timur Leng, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Henry V of England, Charles XII of Sweden, Wallenstein, Napoleon, Hitler: none of them built anything that lasted. The Japanese set out down that same road and learned that same lesson. I'm not saying that might makes right; but might makes sense. An already great power, with important interests in a given area, can have a reason to start or - more often - enter a conflict. And might is often called upon by perceived right; any power that has a quarrel it wants to pursue tends to seek the support of the strongest bully on the block. (The Roman Empire, in particular, grew, often grew as a result of one of the parties in a quarrel calling on their help; read the First Book of Maccabees.)
I am making these distinctions because part of the case, probably of Bradley, and certainly of inverarity, is to ignore them. They treat the imperial ambitions, true or supposed, of a great power such as Roosevelt's United States on the same level as a much smaller power such as Japan in 1940. If the USA have a right to control the Filipines and defend their interests in China, why not Japan? That seems to be the position. Once again, we are in the soup of moral equivalence. inverarity apparently regards all imperialisms as equally bad; and it follows that they are equally good. If America has a right to intervene in China, so does Japan. Now let me rephrase that question: If the USA have a right to control the Filipines and defend their interests in China, why not Rwanda? As a matter of fact, today's Rwanda is a dynamic and rather aggressive little nation which has built itself an empire of sorts out of the immense, decaying body of Congo-Kinshasa; but even the most ambitious of its military leaders, if sane, would laugh at such a comparison.
The point is that states have no "rights" in the sense that individuals have rights. Even the supposedly most obvious of the rights of an independent state, such as moneying, can be curtailed - or even given up - when the disproportion with a neighbour is too great. Both San Marino and the Vatican use money no different from Italian, and, when Italy exchanged the Lira for the Euro, they did so too, even though neither is part of the European Central Bank. Anyone who argues that nations or states have equal rights is living not only in dreamland, but in a vicious dreamland, one which gives free rein to every kind of pointless jealousy and ill-based greed.
One of the points in this is that one of the criteria for a just war is one in which victory can be expected or at least sensibly hoped for. And the reason for that is clear: if you ask people to follow you through the horrors of war, you have to do it for a constructive as well as a merely just reason. Even if we imagined that the jealousy of Japan towards the Western powers had anything to justify it - and it didn't - to rip millions of men from their homes and families, to send them to be killed and brutalized at the ends of the earth under conditions of pure starvation, you have to have a better reason than just the distant chance that if you strike early enough and hard enough perr-haps the enemy will lose heart and nor react. For in that case, you have sentenced millions of men to a horrible life and a hideous death for no reason except your stupid pride.
That, in a nutshell, was the reason for the Japanese to start the war. Which is something inverarity completely, thoroughly, and carefully neglects to mention. There is not a single sentence, a single phrase, in his whole review, where he so much as clearly mentions that someone had started the war - started it, in fact, twice over, first against China, then against the Allies - and had done so with their eyes fully open. No, all he does is talk about how bad war is - thank you sir, but some of us have read the Iliad and knew it already. That war is Hell is a chief topic of Western culture from its foundation; we needed neither a Bradley nor an inverarity to tell us. But what inverarity definitely does say, by implication if not in so many words, is that the horror of war is such that both sides in it are equally the butchers and the victims, that no difference between the two sides can be established, that everyone is reduced to a brute. That is the heart of his thesis, the burden of his song, the moral to his fable; and in doing that, I will show, he goes beyond anything that Bradley actually had to say and suppresses and falsifies the real content of Bradley's work.
Well. Thank you, sir. Thank you for informing me that when my father and his fellow-Romans turned out in their hundreds of thousands, young and old, men and women and children, hysterical with joy and relief, to welcome the Americans as "liberators", they were working under a delusion; that there was no reason to believe that those young men from across the ocean, brutalized as they must have been by war, would behave any better than the Nazi monsters whose tails they had driven out. But you see, you are just plain wrong. The Americans did not abduct or murder any of my great-uncles; the Americans, and the English along with them, did not reduce my grandfather to tears of terror, shame and loss, in front of his own young child, who had never seen his father cry before, and who was never to forget it as long as he lived; the Americans and the English did not make themselves such a by-word for brutality and horror that people revolted against them even without any hope, finding it better to die fighting than to live under such creatures. (There was, in fact, one Moroccan unit in the French Gaullist forces that became notorious for rapes; but they stood out just because of the contrast.) The goodwill the Americans had gained in Italy simply by not being German, they kept by their collective behaviour through the war; generous, friendly and humane in the mass, both black and white, free-handed with the obviously enormous stores of goods they carried with them, feeding the hungry and protecting the helpless, while the Germans murdered and stole up to the very last minute, even after they had been defeated and had no hope. No, sir, war does not brutalize everyone equally.
And in the end, in spite of his carefully mis-selected anecdotes and of his repeated surrenders to moral equivalence, Bradley knows it too. For inverarity has ignored the climax of Bradley's narrative; although Bradley's book is centred about the fate of seven American airmen shot down in the last days of the war above a Japanese-held island, inverarity carefully neglects to say what their fate - that fate that is at the centre of Bradley's narrative - was. He mentions that the unit that captured them was later convicted of war crimes, but what those war crimes were, he doesn't tell us. And he quite obviously does so for a reason: it would ruin his whole picture of two armies, Japanese and American, both equally brutalized by war.
The fact is that those seven American airmen were eaten.
Once you have said that, the whole edifice of moral equivalence upheld by moralistic denunciation, the whole mechanism of blaming war as such for the equal brutalization of every participant, simply breaks down. We know that no Western soldier, not in the most extreme circumstances of hunger and despair, would even conceive of doing such a thing to a living enemy. Even the worst of Bradley's Preacher John anecdote - the anatomical parts cut off and displayed to widespread glee - does not even come close. We can conceive of a desperate man doing it to dead bodies to survive in a mountainside, but not of a soldier doing it to a living enemy because he was an enemy. It simply doesn't arise. It's not how we think of war. It's not how we think of people. It's not how we think of enemies.
But it very definitely was how the depraved Japanese commanders of World War Two thought of enemies. It was not a local incident: to the contrary, the evidence - mustered most recently by Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka, but as early as 1958 by British lawyer Lord Liverpool, whose The Knights of Bushido I own but never had the nerve to read through - is that it was a systematic practice of the Japanese army, initiated in each case by middle-ranking officers and carried out over long periods. Bradley knows this perfectly and has plenty to say of it, including episodes simply too horrendous to report. (And if you don't believe me, read the book.) So why has inverarity not said so much as a word about it? Why has he reduced the horror of Bradley's subjects' deaths to "war crimes", unspecified? Why, because it would blow his thesis to atoms and make utter nonsense of his mood writing. Can you think of any reason, ANY reason, why a writer of enormous talent and considerable practice, who is also a competent reviewer, would fail to mention the CLIMAX, the climax mind you, of a book he is reviewing? There is no way this was not a conscious choice; and being conscious, there is no way that it cannot be called dishonest.
This also explains one place where inverarity upbraids Bradley for inconsistency; and if Bradley had only said what inverarity reported him as saying, it would be inconsistent indeed. It is the long-debated matter of the use of the atom bomb. And indeed, if Bradley's thesis had been, from begining to end, that war levels everyone downwards and makes everyone equally villainous, then inverarity would have been correct in saying that "Bradley very definitely is of the opinion that an invasion would have been inevitable and would have cost millions of lives on both sides, though he bases this on the fact that even Japanese civilians tended to fight to the death or commit suicide rather than be captured by American forces at Japanese outposts. However, everywhere else in the book he's quite willing to believe that Japanese were rational and able to see through their indoctrination when confronted with hard reality; here he assumes that Japan would have turned into a nation of suicide bombers all fighting to the last man, woman, and child." Bradley does not "everywhere else in the book" show himself "quite willing to believe that the Japanese were... able to see through their indoctrination." He believes that SOME were. inverarity, after all he says of the horrors of war, seems quite willing to gamble the lives of millions of allied soldiers and tens of millions of Japanese on the unlikely idea that, faced with reality, all the Japanese nation would have experienced a sudden reawakening to reason. His evidence for it? Zero; or rather, his own severe misrepresentation and concealment of Bradley's evidence.
Here, then, is a summary of this obscene review: racist and culture-imperialist in its premises, unwilling to give the Japanese credit even for their own villainies, mired in moral equivalence and ignorance of history, defaced by prejudice, mendacious in its presentation of evidence, and ultimately utterly fraudulent even in terms of its own subject.
And now a little word about inverarity's hysterical rant against me. Let us suppose for one minute that I were the failure and the pathological being you make me out to be. To put it simply, sir, this would not change anything. I may be a failure, but you utterly misrepresented Bradley and did so in the service of a nauseatingly false moral equivalence. These are the charges you should answer - not whether or not I have been a success at anything. Prove yourself. Show that I have been a failure at convicting you of moral equivalence, lie by omission, and racism. Let's hear your arguments.
The review begins by quoting a nasty little anecdote from 1864:
In December of 1864, an audience in a Denver theater applauded wildly as on stage an ordained Methodist minister displayed the results of the latest encounter between the civilized races and the Others. The minister’s name was John Chivington-Preacher John. Preacher John was a volunteer in the cavalry. Days earlier, he had led an attacking party to Sand Creek, Colorado, where they had surprised and massacred at least 150 Indian children, women, and old men. The braves had been away hunting.
What elicited the roars of approval from the Denver theater audience was not just Preacher John’s tale of "victory" but the grisly evidence. A pile of hacked Indian penises brought laughter. Applause greeted American soldiers who displayed hats over which they had stretched the vaginal skin of Indian women.
None of Denver’s civilized residents saw much wrong with this. No one was ever charged with any wrongdoing. The grateful people of Denver made Preacher John a deputy sheriff, a job he held until he died peacefully in his sleep forty-eight years later at the age of seventy-one.
Let me start from the suspicious lack of context in this account, which seems deliberately edited to leave out the very reasons for the public to behave as they did. Was this, as the author implies, a display of hatred at Indians in general; or was it rather aimed at that particular band? and if so, what had that particular band done to deserve such hatred? (The savagery of Indian methods of warfare is not an invention of white propaganda. The Dakota writer Ohyesa, a.k.a. Charles A. Eastman, confirmed it in detail in his accounts of Dakota life and tried to justify it: "The killing in war of non-combatants, such as women and children, is partly explained by the fact that in savage life the woman without husband or protector is in pitiable case, and it was supposed that the spirit of the warrior would be better content if no widow and orphans were left to suffer want, as well as to weep" - The Soul of the Indian, chapter 4, Gutenberg Project. In the same chapter he asserts that the vicious "dance" practices amounting to self-torture were recent innovations, a justification I don't believe.) That the author has obviously edited the story to mean what he wants it to mean makes me suspect that there was something peculiar about that particular war-band that made its destruction, by whatever means, a welcome piece of news.
Bradley also implies that Preacher John was made a deputy sheriff, and remained one all his life long, because of that one episode, and for no other reason, good or bad. Was he a particularly effective deputy sheriff? Was he highly regarded by law-abiding people? Or was he one of some squalid local power clique, placed in office and kept there at their nod? All these reasons, good or bad, would be a better explanation for Preacher John holding office for so long, certainly better than the notion that a single, particularly bloodthirsty speech had kept ringing in people's ears for decades.
This is the first point. The author is clearly being less than honest with that particular anecdote; and inverarity applauds.
However, I am not interested in that. I may want to look it up at some point, but my point is a great deal more general. Even if the anecdote were honestly presented, even if I was wrong in finding it suspicious and tendentious, even if the Denver men were the murderous rabble, and Preacher John the monster, it wants to describe, still its presentation would be dishonest in a much deeper way. One does not, perhaps, expect an admirer of Richard Dawkins to see it. Someone like inverarity might see nothing strange in the picture of an American Protestant minister in the nineteenth century jumping up and down with enthusiasm at the mass murder of natives; but anyone who knows anything about the history of American Protestantism is bound to be surprised.
To put it simply, the nineteenth century was the golden age of American Protestant mission, and the prime target of American missionaries were, for obvious reasons, their own local heathens - the Indians. To convert Indians had been, in words, a wish-dream, a stated desire, from the days of Jamestown; but until the early nineteenth century, the Protestant churches of Britain and America had not had any structure or personnel dedicated primarily to mission. It was from 1810 on, that, on both sides of the Atlantic, prosperous religious bodies, growing on the increasing wealth of the two countries, found both the impulse and the resources to set up a series of denominational Missionary Societies. These Societies, in general, drew the best of the available personnel - the most ambitious, the hardest-working, bravest and best educated of the clergy of each denomination. It was, after all, dangerous work; work that requires adapting to distant and different communities; work that might lead to a swift and unpleasant end, and sometimes did.
In terms of evangelization, the result was indifferent. But it had a number of important side effects. Much of the best ethnology of the time was produced by missionaries who had spent ten or twenty years with the tribes they described, had learned their language and heart their conversation. And the missionaries also became a formidable lobby for the humane treatment of natives. As early as 1810, the London Missionary Society (Anglican), only just established, was already protesting in Britain over the oppression of blacks in England's newly acquired South African colony. You can't say that the missionaries were slow on the case. It only took 184 years for politics to catch up with the views of missionaries about South African realities.
inverarity, the admirer of the silly Richard Dawkins, seems to find it natural that a Christian preacher should celebrate the butchery of natives; anyone who knows any American history would find it absurd. It would be against the views and precedent of every major denomination, from Catholic to Baptist, from Presbyterian to Mormon. They all were led by their missionaries, and their missionaries were a lobby for natives. And it's not as though the issue were obscure or the material hard to access. One poke in Project Gutenberg delivers more than a hundred items whose subject or title includes the word "missionary", the vast majority of which concern this particular period and place - America, the nineteenth century. Anyone who so wishes can build up a sound historical picture of missionaries in nineteenth-century America without too much effort, and at no expense at all. Bradley did not bother to. He sought out his one odious anecdote and left the matter there. He has slandered by implication the Methodists and other Christians, and inverarity follows him, wagging his tail. The plural of anecdote - as we historians often say - may not be data, but the singular of anecdote, in this case, is certainly blind and brutal prejudice. This isn't just a glib moral equivocation of atrocities taking place decades apart, claims inverarity. Indeed not: it is a glib, misleading and fraudulent moral equivocation of atrocities taking place decades apart, in different continents, in different contexts and for entirely different reasons.
But let's follow Bradley and inverarity's reasoning: a few decades later, those same Americans (or their children, one would think) did terrible things during their invasion of the Filipines, and the Japanese saw and learned. Let us start from this point. To suggest that a nation only learns from the worst of another is repulsive, and insulting to the Japanese themselves. And it involves self-regard of a rare quality. In the picture inverarity delivers, it's all about America - with a token nod to European powers - and what America did to Japan or in Japan's view. Japan was forced out of its centuries-long isolation by American gunboats, built itself into a colonial power just like the colonial powers it was surrounded by, and was a studious observer of how the Americans and Europeans played the imperialism game.
Astonishingly, Bradley claims to be an American patriot. It is possible that he is so steeped in the language of relativism, with its attendant grammar of abuse of anecdotes, that he genuinely does not realize that some vague regard for one's country is not enough to make one a patriot; otherwise KGB general Kim Philby, the lifelong cricket fanatic, Times reader, and most infamous of all traitors, would count as one. Bradley is a moral equivalence merchant; and moral equivalence is not only the enemy of any correct morality, it is also the enemy of any decent patriotism. There would be no point in wanting the country you love to live up to her potential, if you regarded her evils - and heaven knows my country has the Devil's plenty - as no better or worse than the evils of China or Bohemia. If everything is the same and everything is equally bad, I would have no particular reason to want actual evils dealt with, and not much reason to love my country either.
But in this, though nothing like a patriot, he is visibly and spectacularly a nationalist - indeed, a culture imperialist. It's all about us, us - US. That Japan may have chosen those features of Western culture that interested it and rejected others it did not care for - that Japan, in fact, is anything more than the infantile imitator of the deeds of others - does not begin to occur to the writer of this passage, be he Bradley or inverarity. (For as I will show when the time comes, inverarity has certainly pushed Bradley even further down the path of reckless moral equivalence, ignoring large amounts of evidence that Bradley was too honest to drop.) Japan, as a matter of fact, had been intimately involved with European civilization for centuries before the Black Ships of 1854; it had imported European books, learned from European illustration (look up Ukiyo-E), rebuilt its atlases on European models, absorbed as much European knowledge as it could - before America even existed. Dutch ships allowed into Nagasaki always carried loads of books for curious Japanese intellectuals (for this reason Dutch, until 1854, was the best-known European language in Japan, and Japanese printers even printed imitation European prints with Dutch writing). By the time Commodore Perry forced Japan to alter the terms of its dealings with other countries, Japan was as culturally able to deal with the West as any non-Western country. As for the invasion of China being an imitation of Western imperialism, it may have imitated its methods - though it got even those wrong, as I will show in a minute - but anyone who knows anything about Japan should have realized that it was nothing but an ancient Japanese dream. Everyone who has an even passing familiarity with Japanese history knows that the famous Toyotomi Hideyoshi seriously undertook the invasion of Korea and China in the late fifteen hundreds; but he was only resurrecting a previous plan by his predecessor Oda Nobunaga. (And indeed, why not? China had already been conquered several times by bordering nations - Todas, Mongols, and, after Toyotomi's time, Manchus. Why should the Japanese not try? They failed, but that does not mean it was a crazy idea.) Japan's long seclusion behind its own ocean had no doubt also saved Korea and China a lot of trouble, but to ascribe the dreams of Toyotomi and Oda to Western influence is a racist piece of nonsense. Western Imperialism and Western Colonialism are unique, it says. There has never been anything like them in the world before. Any attempt by one country to conquer another can only be caused by imitation of Western Imperialism. And cheese can be found in unlimited quantities on the Moon. (Sorry, Wallace and Gromit.) And incidentally, anyone who imagines that the Fascist Japanese government of the thirties and wartime was a natural and welcome expression of Japanese society has no idea what happened in Japan in the late twenties. The war criminals of the forties were domestic criminals in the twenties and early thirties, making their way by methods similar to the Mafia - intimidation, murder, secret corruption and connivance. There was not even so much of electoral process as placed Mussolini or Hitler in power. Parliamentary government was murdered.
Nobody argues that the American invasion of the Philipines was not a vicious as well as a stupid act. It was a late blossom on a peculiarly ugly period of Western expansion - a period in which people had gone out to conquer not because there was any reason, but because it was the fashion. Italy and Germany went looking for colonies they did not need because all the pink areas on the world's map made Britain look so impressive. The individual adventure of the hideous King Leopold II of Belgium produced what is probably the most criminal government in modern history - the so-called "Free State of Congo" - probably more murderous than Stalin, certainly than Hitler, and for meaner reasons. The fad of conquering for its own sake reached America rather late, when Europe had already partitioned Africa, and produced the useless and cruel result of a colony America did not need, could not defend in case of war (as was clearly shown in 1941-2), and paid dearly to conquer. But this kind of stupidity was not unique: it was the same kind of stupidity that led Italy to invade Ethiopia when it had neither interests there nor any way to defend it against a credible enemy (since it was beyond the Suez Canal and Italy did not control that), or Germany to carve out improbable slices of Africa or Melanesia for no better reason than to get a few Prussian officers to strut in pith helmets and white uniforms.
But to make this typical of "Western Imperialism" is entirely wrong. The growth of the West had gone on for centuries, and, like all empires in all parts of the world, had only one real reason: the West was stronger. It is significant that, except for the Netherlands, the countries that were in the van of early European expansion - Portugal, England, Russia - were outlying and rather weak communities, incapable of taking part in the political struggles of central Europe. They moved outward because stronger communities prevented them from effectively moving inward. Russia reached China and Alaska before it was anything like a serious player in Europe; and at the time in which she was laying the bases for the greatest empire the world has ever known, England was a shattered, leaderless country, shaken by civil wars and Irish and Scottish revolts, and whose policies, especially after Cromwell, were for all practical purposes reduced to an unhappy choice as to whether she wanted to be invaded by France (as Charles II tried in 1670 with the treaty of Dover) or by the Netherlands (as eventually happened in 1688). And yet these countries, little more than ciphers on the European stage, built enormous empires outside Europe. The truth is that because most of the great European powers - France, Austria/Empire, Poland, Sweden, Venice - were chiefly concerned with surviving each other's attentions, the strength they represented was not really understood, inside or outside Europe. But the fact that the three weakest European powers had already by 1700 established empires that stretched across continents just shows how much power was vested in those states, especially France, that had the power to keep the imperial powers out of the continent of Europe. Once that power turned outwards, the rest of the world could do nothing but abide the blast.
Empires arise for one simple reason: that they are the strongest. The origins of that strength may be many and deserve attention, but otherwise the story is always the same. Once the city of Rome had unified the whole peninsula of Italy under its own control, the rest of the Mediterranean was bound to fall under her sway one way or another; there was no power anywhere that commanded comparable resources. The Roman Empire was an inevitability. But the imperialist policies of the Japanese Fascists were not based on any existing strength. Japan in 1939 was not an industrialized country; the industrial colossus we know only started after the war. "In 1938, Toyota only produced 458 cars, Honda 1242, and Datsun 2908." (Richard Overy, Why the Allies Won, page 221 and notes.) For all that it had been consistently allocated everything the country could produce, the Japanese army only had one truck for every 49 soldiers - America had one every thirteen. Japan had practically no tanks and no anti-tank weapons, and its troops were still trained in archery and sword-fighting. In terms of weaponry and supply even Italy did better. (And this is a savage remark.) Japan only had a navy, and that because it had spent decades building it up; and that navy was fragile, since, once its capital ships were lost (as they were at Midway), no replacement could quickly be prepared.
In other words, there was no reason to project a Japanese Empire outwards. Japanese ambitions were not really motivated by the real reach and weight of Japanese interest - while all the European empires, including Russia, had been led by commercial penetration and reach - but by jealousy and pride. England and the other European countries had built up great empires in the track of their trade and their finance; Japan wanted one just as big, whether it needed it or not. It is significant that it was only when it was forced to forget this nonsense that Japan really began its climb towards the position of world industrial power.
If there is one lesson that history teaches over and over again, it is that empires arise by chance and strength, not by individual or collective decision. Nobody can get up one morning and say: I intend to build an empire. Those who do, infallibly, suffer either Napoleon's fate or Alexander of Macedon's fate. That is: either they see the whole effort at empire-building and personal glory collapse before their eyes, or they have the good luck to die before all their bloody conquests start to unravel, but their death is the signal for the unravelling. Timur Leng, Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden, Henry V of England, Charles XII of Sweden, Wallenstein, Napoleon, Hitler: none of them built anything that lasted. The Japanese set out down that same road and learned that same lesson. I'm not saying that might makes right; but might makes sense. An already great power, with important interests in a given area, can have a reason to start or - more often - enter a conflict. And might is often called upon by perceived right; any power that has a quarrel it wants to pursue tends to seek the support of the strongest bully on the block. (The Roman Empire, in particular, grew, often grew as a result of one of the parties in a quarrel calling on their help; read the First Book of Maccabees.)
I am making these distinctions because part of the case, probably of Bradley, and certainly of inverarity, is to ignore them. They treat the imperial ambitions, true or supposed, of a great power such as Roosevelt's United States on the same level as a much smaller power such as Japan in 1940. If the USA have a right to control the Filipines and defend their interests in China, why not Japan? That seems to be the position. Once again, we are in the soup of moral equivalence. inverarity apparently regards all imperialisms as equally bad; and it follows that they are equally good. If America has a right to intervene in China, so does Japan. Now let me rephrase that question: If the USA have a right to control the Filipines and defend their interests in China, why not Rwanda? As a matter of fact, today's Rwanda is a dynamic and rather aggressive little nation which has built itself an empire of sorts out of the immense, decaying body of Congo-Kinshasa; but even the most ambitious of its military leaders, if sane, would laugh at such a comparison.
The point is that states have no "rights" in the sense that individuals have rights. Even the supposedly most obvious of the rights of an independent state, such as moneying, can be curtailed - or even given up - when the disproportion with a neighbour is too great. Both San Marino and the Vatican use money no different from Italian, and, when Italy exchanged the Lira for the Euro, they did so too, even though neither is part of the European Central Bank. Anyone who argues that nations or states have equal rights is living not only in dreamland, but in a vicious dreamland, one which gives free rein to every kind of pointless jealousy and ill-based greed.
One of the points in this is that one of the criteria for a just war is one in which victory can be expected or at least sensibly hoped for. And the reason for that is clear: if you ask people to follow you through the horrors of war, you have to do it for a constructive as well as a merely just reason. Even if we imagined that the jealousy of Japan towards the Western powers had anything to justify it - and it didn't - to rip millions of men from their homes and families, to send them to be killed and brutalized at the ends of the earth under conditions of pure starvation, you have to have a better reason than just the distant chance that if you strike early enough and hard enough perr-haps the enemy will lose heart and nor react. For in that case, you have sentenced millions of men to a horrible life and a hideous death for no reason except your stupid pride.
That, in a nutshell, was the reason for the Japanese to start the war. Which is something inverarity completely, thoroughly, and carefully neglects to mention. There is not a single sentence, a single phrase, in his whole review, where he so much as clearly mentions that someone had started the war - started it, in fact, twice over, first against China, then against the Allies - and had done so with their eyes fully open. No, all he does is talk about how bad war is - thank you sir, but some of us have read the Iliad and knew it already. That war is Hell is a chief topic of Western culture from its foundation; we needed neither a Bradley nor an inverarity to tell us. But what inverarity definitely does say, by implication if not in so many words, is that the horror of war is such that both sides in it are equally the butchers and the victims, that no difference between the two sides can be established, that everyone is reduced to a brute. That is the heart of his thesis, the burden of his song, the moral to his fable; and in doing that, I will show, he goes beyond anything that Bradley actually had to say and suppresses and falsifies the real content of Bradley's work.
Well. Thank you, sir. Thank you for informing me that when my father and his fellow-Romans turned out in their hundreds of thousands, young and old, men and women and children, hysterical with joy and relief, to welcome the Americans as "liberators", they were working under a delusion; that there was no reason to believe that those young men from across the ocean, brutalized as they must have been by war, would behave any better than the Nazi monsters whose tails they had driven out. But you see, you are just plain wrong. The Americans did not abduct or murder any of my great-uncles; the Americans, and the English along with them, did not reduce my grandfather to tears of terror, shame and loss, in front of his own young child, who had never seen his father cry before, and who was never to forget it as long as he lived; the Americans and the English did not make themselves such a by-word for brutality and horror that people revolted against them even without any hope, finding it better to die fighting than to live under such creatures. (There was, in fact, one Moroccan unit in the French Gaullist forces that became notorious for rapes; but they stood out just because of the contrast.) The goodwill the Americans had gained in Italy simply by not being German, they kept by their collective behaviour through the war; generous, friendly and humane in the mass, both black and white, free-handed with the obviously enormous stores of goods they carried with them, feeding the hungry and protecting the helpless, while the Germans murdered and stole up to the very last minute, even after they had been defeated and had no hope. No, sir, war does not brutalize everyone equally.
And in the end, in spite of his carefully mis-selected anecdotes and of his repeated surrenders to moral equivalence, Bradley knows it too. For inverarity has ignored the climax of Bradley's narrative; although Bradley's book is centred about the fate of seven American airmen shot down in the last days of the war above a Japanese-held island, inverarity carefully neglects to say what their fate - that fate that is at the centre of Bradley's narrative - was. He mentions that the unit that captured them was later convicted of war crimes, but what those war crimes were, he doesn't tell us. And he quite obviously does so for a reason: it would ruin his whole picture of two armies, Japanese and American, both equally brutalized by war.
The fact is that those seven American airmen were eaten.
Once you have said that, the whole edifice of moral equivalence upheld by moralistic denunciation, the whole mechanism of blaming war as such for the equal brutalization of every participant, simply breaks down. We know that no Western soldier, not in the most extreme circumstances of hunger and despair, would even conceive of doing such a thing to a living enemy. Even the worst of Bradley's Preacher John anecdote - the anatomical parts cut off and displayed to widespread glee - does not even come close. We can conceive of a desperate man doing it to dead bodies to survive in a mountainside, but not of a soldier doing it to a living enemy because he was an enemy. It simply doesn't arise. It's not how we think of war. It's not how we think of people. It's not how we think of enemies.
But it very definitely was how the depraved Japanese commanders of World War Two thought of enemies. It was not a local incident: to the contrary, the evidence - mustered most recently by Japanese historian Yuki Tanaka, but as early as 1958 by British lawyer Lord Liverpool, whose The Knights of Bushido I own but never had the nerve to read through - is that it was a systematic practice of the Japanese army, initiated in each case by middle-ranking officers and carried out over long periods. Bradley knows this perfectly and has plenty to say of it, including episodes simply too horrendous to report. (And if you don't believe me, read the book.) So why has inverarity not said so much as a word about it? Why has he reduced the horror of Bradley's subjects' deaths to "war crimes", unspecified? Why, because it would blow his thesis to atoms and make utter nonsense of his mood writing. Can you think of any reason, ANY reason, why a writer of enormous talent and considerable practice, who is also a competent reviewer, would fail to mention the CLIMAX, the climax mind you, of a book he is reviewing? There is no way this was not a conscious choice; and being conscious, there is no way that it cannot be called dishonest.
This also explains one place where inverarity upbraids Bradley for inconsistency; and if Bradley had only said what inverarity reported him as saying, it would be inconsistent indeed. It is the long-debated matter of the use of the atom bomb. And indeed, if Bradley's thesis had been, from begining to end, that war levels everyone downwards and makes everyone equally villainous, then inverarity would have been correct in saying that "Bradley very definitely is of the opinion that an invasion would have been inevitable and would have cost millions of lives on both sides, though he bases this on the fact that even Japanese civilians tended to fight to the death or commit suicide rather than be captured by American forces at Japanese outposts. However, everywhere else in the book he's quite willing to believe that Japanese were rational and able to see through their indoctrination when confronted with hard reality; here he assumes that Japan would have turned into a nation of suicide bombers all fighting to the last man, woman, and child." Bradley does not "everywhere else in the book" show himself "quite willing to believe that the Japanese were... able to see through their indoctrination." He believes that SOME were. inverarity, after all he says of the horrors of war, seems quite willing to gamble the lives of millions of allied soldiers and tens of millions of Japanese on the unlikely idea that, faced with reality, all the Japanese nation would have experienced a sudden reawakening to reason. His evidence for it? Zero; or rather, his own severe misrepresentation and concealment of Bradley's evidence.
Here, then, is a summary of this obscene review: racist and culture-imperialist in its premises, unwilling to give the Japanese credit even for their own villainies, mired in moral equivalence and ignorance of history, defaced by prejudice, mendacious in its presentation of evidence, and ultimately utterly fraudulent even in terms of its own subject.
And now a little word about inverarity's hysterical rant against me. Let us suppose for one minute that I were the failure and the pathological being you make me out to be. To put it simply, sir, this would not change anything. I may be a failure, but you utterly misrepresented Bradley and did so in the service of a nauseatingly false moral equivalence. These are the charges you should answer - not whether or not I have been a success at anything. Prove yourself. Show that I have been a failure at convicting you of moral equivalence, lie by omission, and racism. Let's hear your arguments.