This Week in History
August 30 - September 5, 2015
At End of World War II, General MacArthur Warned: Create New System, or Face Armageddon! (September 2, 1945)
By Gerald Belsky
Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Emperor Hirohito at their first meeting, at the U.S. Embassy, Tokyo, September 27, 1945. |
In a radio address to the American people on September 2, 1945 on board the battleship Missouri after the Japanese surrender ceremony marking the end of World War II, General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, stated that with the development of atomic weapons ( and the absolutely unnecessary dropping of the atomic bomb on Japan), it was now imperative to revise the “traditional concept of war”. [1]
Unlike the deranged, virtually Satanic British puppet Obama today, MacArthur, echoing the earlier views of the deceased President Franklin Roosevelt, shared at the time by most veterans of World War II, such as Lyndon LaRouche and John F. Kennedy, boldly called for replacing the British imperial game of “balances of power” and “military alliances”, with a “new more equitable system”, or, he warned, we faced “Armageddon”.
Such a new system, he recognized, would require an “improvement in human character”, and “it must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.” Such is, of course, the promise of the emerging economic development policies of the BRICS nations. Such a new policy is to be celebrated at the ceremonies in China on Sept 3 commemorating the end of World War II in the Pacific.
But with the British imperial intention of destroying the BRICS, and their hysteria over the imminent financial collapse of the City of London-Wall Street system, we have reached the very point of destruction of civilization, about which MacArthur warned, unless the British puppet Obama is removed very soon.
A Nobler Idea
At the surrender ceremony itself on September 2, 1945, General MacArthur gave a short speech, which reflected the sentiments of his hero Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural Address [2] at the end of the Civil War, for “malice toward none, and charity for all”, in order to rise to a higher dignity, thus implicitly rejecting what MacArthur knew to be calls for harsh punishment of the Japanese because of wartime atrocities. His speech included the following:
“We are gathered her, representatives of the major warring powers to conclude a solemn agreement whereby peace may be restored. The issues, involving divergent ideals and ideologies, have been determined on the battlefields of the world and hence are not for our discussion or debate. Nor is it for us here to meet, representing as we do a majority of the people of the earth, in a spirit of distrust, malice or hatred. But rather it is for us, both victors and vanquished, to rise to that higher dignity which alone befits the sacred purposes we are about to serve, committing all our people unreservedly to faithful compliance with the obligation they are here formally to assume.
“It is my earnest hope and indeed the hope of all mankind that from this solemn occasion a better world shall emerge out of the blood and carnage of the past – a world founded upon faith and understanding- a world dedicated to the dignity of man and the fulfillment of his most cherished wish- for freedom, tolerance and justice.”
MacArthur then gave his radio broadcast to the American people, which included the following prescient ideas of what must emerge in the new era from the “blood and carnage of the past”, if we are to avoid Armageddon:
“Today the guns are silent. A great tragedy has ended. A great victory has been won. The skies no longer rain death-the seas bear only commerce-men everywhere walk upright in the sunlight. The entire world is quietly at peace. The holy mission has been accomplished…
“A new era is upon us. Even the lesson of victory itself brings with it profound concern, both for our future security and the survival of civilization. The destructiveness of the war potential, through progressive advances in scientific discovery, has in fact now reached a point which revises the traditional concept of war.
“Men since the beginning of time have sought peace. Various methods through the ages have attempted to devise an international process to prevent or settle disputes between nations. From the very start workable methods were found insofar as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics found insofar as individual citizens were concerned, but the mechanics of an instrumentality of larger international scope have never been successful. Military alliances, balances of power, leagues of nations, all in turn failed, leaving the only path to be by way of the crucible of war. We have had our last chance. If we do not now devise some greater and more equitable system, Armageddon will be at our door. The problem basically is theological and involves a spiritual recrudescence and improvement of character that will synchronize with our almost matchless advances in science, art, literature and all material and cultural developments of the past two thousand years. It must be of the spirit if we are to save the flesh.”
A member of the Japanese surrender party, the American-educated Mr. Toshikazu Kase of the Japanese foreign office, who had been delegated the task of writing a report to the Emperor of the surrender ceremony, wrote a very eloquent statement on the dramatic effect which General MacArthur’s words had upon him, which included the following:
“When the Supreme Commander finished, I wrote in my report the impression his words had made on me. He is a man of peace. Never has the truth of the line ‘peace has her victories no less renowned than war’ been more eloquently demonstrated. He is a man of light. Radiantly, the gathering rays of his magnanimous soul embrace the earth, his footsteps paving the world with light. Is it not a piece of rare good fortune, I asked myself, that a man of such caliber and character should have been designated as the Supreme Commander who will shape the destiny of Japan? In the dark hour of our despair and distress, a bright light is ushered in, in the very person of General MacArthur.”
In his report to the Emperor which Kase quickly wrote describing MacArthur’s address, which was taken immediately to the Emperor by the Foreign Minister, Shigemitsu, who had headed the surrender delegation and had signed the surrender document, Kase states the following:
“…I raised a question whether it would have been possible for us, had we been victorious, to embrace the vanquished with a similar magnanimity. Clearly it would have been different. Returning from the audience, Shigemitsu told me that the Emperor nodded with a sigh in agreement. Indeed, a distance inexpressible by numbers separates us - America from Japan. After all, we were not beaten on the battlefield by dint of superior arms. We were defeated in the spiritual contest by virtue of a nobler idea. The real issue was moral-beyond all the powers of algebra to compute.
“The day will come when recorded time, age on age, will seem but a point in retrospect. However, happen what may in the future, this Big Day on the Missouri will stand out as one of the brightest dates in history, with General MacArthur as a shining obelisk in the desert of human endeavor that marks a timeless march onward toward an enduring peace.” [3]
If the U.S. were to be part of such a peace today, it would have to return to this moral principle, this “nobler idea”.
In his autobiographical book, Reminiscences, written just before his death in 1964, General MacArthur reflects on the boundless optimism he felt at the end of World War II, of the uniqueness of the United States in carrying out this moral purpose, which is the same mission and view of man, as distinct from the animals, which American statesman and fellow World War II veteran Lyndon LaRouche most profoundly understands and is committed to revive today:
“I told myself, the tide of affairs may ebb and flow, old empires may die, new nations be born; alliances may arise, thrive, wither and vanish - but in its effort to build economic growth and prosperity, an atmosphere of hope and freedom, a community of strength and unity of purpose, a lasting peace of justice, my own beloved country now leads the world. It points the way to an age of evolution, in which the brain of man will abstract from the universe its fundamental secrets. Today’s wonders will become tomorrow’s obsolescence. We stand at the threshold of a new life. What vast panoramas will open before us none can say. They are there just over the horizon, just over there. And they are of a magnificence and a diversity far beyond the comprehension of anyone here today. This new world would have no boundaries - no lost horizons. Its limits would be as broad as the spirit and the imagination of man.”
The Occupation of Japan
Shortly after General MacArthur assumed his duties as Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers (SCAP), he issued a public statement that “SCAP is not concerned with how to keep Japan down, but how to get her on her feet again.” In opposition to the British and their Wall Street allies in the State Department, such as then Undersecretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs Dean Acheson, MacArthur insisted on rebuilding Japan in the best tradition of the U.S. military, with a sincere concern for the general welfare of the country he occupied. MacArthur was given the mission of destroying Japan’s ability to wage aggressive war, and to break up its feudal zaibatsu industrial combines, which had backed the imperial war effort. But MacArthur intended a much bigger social change in essentially applying the American System to Japan, which enraged both the British and their State department allies. MacArthur describes his thinking in his Reminiscences, which is the reflection of the American Military tradition, in direct opposition to the policy of British puppet Obama today :
“I underlined again and again that we had several missions. It was true that we intended to destroy Japan as a militarist power. It was true that we intended to impose penalties for past wrongs. These things had been set out in the surrender terms. But we also felt that we could best accomplish our purpose by building a new kind of Japan, one that would give the Japanese people freedom and justice, and some kind of security. I was determined that our principles during the occupation would be the same principles for which our soldiers had fought on the battlefield.”
As a result, MacArthur’s occupation of Japan has to rank as one of the best examples of a successful military occupation ever to have occurred in history. It was done in the true spirit of the Treaty of Westphalia, concern for the benefit of the other. To guide him in unchartered territory, knowing that most occupations had ended in failure, MacArthur drew on advice from the great republican thinker Plato from The Republic, which he would often quote to his staff, as well as from the thinking of Washington and Lincoln. From his study of Plato, General MacArthur must have known that his oligarchical enemies in Washington and London thought like the character Thrasymachus, who is portrayed in The Republic as defending the notion that “justice” is simply the right of the stronger over the weaker.
According to biographer William Manchester, in Tokyo “MacArthur told a reporter, ‘My major advisors now have boiled down to almost two men - George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. One founded the United States, the other saved it. If you go back in their lives, you can find almost all the answers.’” Throughout World War II, wherever MacArthur established his headquarters, he carried with him portraits of Washington and Lincoln. Manchester adds, “Certainly his philosophy of government belonged to an earlier time. In an age of pragmatic politicians, the General sought footholds on the bedrock of principles.” [4]
Rather than rule as a dictator, under martial law, General MacArthur operated through a reformed Japanese government, and he respected the position of the Emperor, whose role was changed from a god to a constitutional monarch, in a reform of the existing meiji constitution. With the cooperation of the Emperor, General MacArthur implemented a series of far-reaching “American System” reforms of Japanese society, in order that Japan could be freed from feudal relics of its past and achieve a position of dignity in the post war “community of nations”. He gave Japanese women the right to vote. He gave all Japanese workers the right to join unions and collectively bargain, something that his Republican allies in the United States were not too happy about.
Most importantly, he carried out a revolutionary policy of land reform, which he characterized as the most successful in history since the attempt by the Gracchi brothers to reform the Roman Republic‘s landholding policies, ending serfdom and tenant farming, by forcing large landowners to divide their farms, so that with the aid of long term government low interest loans, the farmers could purchase the land and become independent farmers.
Perhaps the most radical of his reforms in Japan, which drove the cold warriors wild, esp. when they contemplated using Japan as a military base in the Cold War, was General MacArthur’s promotion of the clause in the Japanese constitution, Article 9, which outlawed war (although not self-defense), the very injunction which Obama and Japanese Prime Minister Abe want to abolish, against the wishes of the majority of the Japanese population!
MacArthur wanted to demonstrate to the world that Japan was no longer a warrior nation, so that it could reestablish its trade relations with the rest of Asia, esp. since he knew that Japan’s former colonies harbored tremendous rage at the atrocities that Japan had committed during the war. Since Japan could not produce most of the raw materials needed for its existence, it would have to trade with the rest of Asia.; MacArthur wanted to make his reforms the basis for an American System reform throughout Asia, a “grand design” to raise living standards throughout Asia, which he saw as the “new frontier” of civilization. Furthermore, MacArthur, contrary to his critics who liked to portray him as a “war monger”, genuinely wished to outlaw war.
General MacArthur wanted to rebuild the Japanese economy in order to promote “the general welfare”, but, according to his aide General Whitney, “MacArthur’s original directive from Washington contained the specific injunction that he should not ’assume any responsibility for the economic rehabilitation or the strengthening of the Japanese economy’ “ As Whitney emphasizes, had MacArthur complied with the strict letter of this injunction, “Japan would have gone into economic oblivion. So, without assuming ’any responsibility’, he worked through the Japanese government, just as he did in reorienting the nation politically, to revive Japan’s economic life and restore to her a free and healthy economy.” [5]
A Grand Design for Asia
General MacArthur saw his reforms in Japan as part of an effort to build a “grand design” for Asia, that would end colonialism and raise the living standards of Asia, in opposition to the Anglo-American geopoliticians, who wanted to keep the Asian masses enslaved to imperialism.
He never abandoned the cause of ending colonialism. In fact, when MacArthur was relieved by Truman of his commands in the Pacific because of his opposition to the Truman administration policy, under British direction, of prolonging the Korean War in order to build up NATO (more on this in a forthcoming future article) and addressed a joint session of Congress in April, 1951, before he even addressed the question of the Korean War, he discussed the “revolutionary changes” in Asia and the model of the U.S. in the Philippines:
“…Long exploited by the so-called colonial powers, with little opportunity to achieve any degree of social justice, individual dignity, or a higher standard of life such as guided our own noble administration of the Philippines, the peoples of Asia found their opportunity in the war just past to throw off the shackles of colonialism and now see the dawn of a new opportunity, a heretofore unfelt dignity and the self-respect of political freedom.”
MacArthur pointed out, in opposition to the Truman Administration’s support for British and French colonialism that Asia constituted “half of the earth’s population and 60% of its natural resources”, and that Asians “are rapidly consolidating a new force, both moral and material, with which to raise the living standards and erect adaptations of the design of modern progress to their own distinct cultural environment. Whether one adheres to the concept of colonialism or not, this is the direction of Asian progress and it may not be stopped. It is a corollary to the shift of the world economic frontiers as the whole epicenter of world affairs rotates back to the area from which it started. In this situation it becomes vital that our country orient its policy in consonance with this basic revolutionary condition, rather than pursue a course blind to the reality that the colonial era is now passed and the Asian peoples covet the right to shape their own free destiny. What they seek now is friendly guidance, understanding and support, not imperialist direction; the dignity of equality, not the shame of subjugation.”
After MacArthur was relieved from his commands in 1951 and toured the nation attacking the corrupt Truman administration, he had the following to say about his vision for Asia as the new center of world trade, in a speech before a large crowd in Seattle:
“…Our economic frontier now embraces the trade potentialities of Asia itself; for with the gradual rotation of the epicenter of world trade back to the Far East whence it started many centuries ago, the next thousand years will find the main world problem the raising of sub-normal standards of life of its more than a billion people. The opportunities for international trade then, if pursued with the vision and courage of the early pioneer, will be limitless…”
Arguing against those in the eastern establishment who had supported a Marshall Plan for Western Europe in order to build up the Atlantic Alliance in the Cold War, but did not support for racist reasons any such plan to raise the living standards of Asia, MacArthur declared, “The living standards of the people of the Oriental East must and will be raised by a closer relativity with that of the Occidental West…There must be such a development of opportunity that the requirements for a better life in the Oriental East may be filled from the almost unlimited industrial potential of the Occidental West. The human and material resources of the East would be used in compensation for the manufactures of the West. Once this elementary logic is recognized, trade with the Far East may be expected rapidly to expand under the stimulus of American vision, American enterprise and American pioneering spirit.”
Of course, today, the industrial potential of the West has collapsed, while China has taken the leadership in promoting the industrial and scientific development of this planet, and the universe beyond, with its work on its planned lunar missions. All the more reason, for the U.S. to cooperate with China in reviving the MacArthur vision of raising the standard of living of Asia with a return to the commitment of the U.S. to lead the world in creating economic growth and prosperity, based upon the MacArthur view that “this new world would have no boundaries - no lost horizons. Its limits would be as broad as the spirit and the imagination of man.”
Genius and the American Republican Tradition
General MacArthur was a genius, who did not think deductively from simply past experience, but with the “imagination”, in thinking from the future, which, as Lyndon LaRouche has stressed, should be the natural condition of being human. MacArthur, of course, applied this method of using his imagination to foresee the future in his brilliant military flanking actions, in order to outthink the enemy in devising plans for winning war in the shortest time and with the least casualties, as he did in his famous “island-hopping” campaigns in the Pacific during World War II and in his Inchon amphibious flanking action during the Korean War.. But his most important accomplishment he considered to be his post-war occupation of Japan and his plans to end war on this planet, by working for a new more equitable system, a task he has bequeathed to us and this movement.
His own commitment to such a future MacArthur would readily admit to be the realization of America’s republican tradition against oligarchism and empire, but it was specifically his own republican family tradition of his notable grandfather and father, which fostered his own development of his mind, which made possible MacArthur’s accomplishments. MacArthur was trained by this family tradition to see himself as an intellectual leader of the American republican system, in opposition to the British imperial system, and to carry this tradition forward into Asia, in particular.
His paternal grandfather Arthur MacArthur, Sr. came to America in 1825 from his native Scotland with his widowed mother to seek a better life in republican America, and escape from the legacy of the British Empire. After gaining his law degree, Arthur moved to Milwaukee and become a force in the reform wing of the Democratic Party, serving first as Lieutenant Governor, and then as Circuit Court Judge.
Arthur, Sr. loved Shakespeare and Scottish republican poet Robert Burns, organizing poetry recitations as president and organizer of the Robert Burns Society in Milwaukee. His love of Classical literature and skill as a public orator he passed on to his grandson Douglas, as he did his leadership abilities on behalf of republican principles.
Although a Democrat, he never supported slavery, nor the spread of slavery, which the national Democratic party supported. When the Civil War broke out, Judge MacArthur organized the Union Democratic Party and held mass rallies across Wisconsin in support of Lincoln and the maintenance of the union. As the biographer of his son, Arthur, Jr., the father of Douglas, put it, “The Union Democrats supported Lincoln, with MacArthur leading the way. Before packed crowds throughout the state, the judge repeated his belief that the Union came before party politics.” [6]
After the Civil War, Judge MacArthur was appointed by President Grant in 1870 to serve as a judge of the Supreme Court of the District of Columbia, a position he held for seventeen years, and while in Washington he became a leading figure in Washington social and intellectual circles. He also became close friends of the great hero of the Civil War, and successor to Lincoln, President Grant, who after he left the White House, always came to visit Judge MacArthur whenever he was in Washington, to enjoy his eloquent and witty discussion.
His son, Arthur, Jr., Douglas’ father, was a devoted follower of Lincoln, and longed to enlist in the Civil War when he was 16. He had long wanted to be a soldier, and had studied at a military academy even before the Civil War began. Rather than allow his son to enlist at such an early age, Arthur, Sr. convinced his son to study at a military academy for one more year, and then arranged to have his son meet with President Lincoln in the White House with the senior congressman from Wisconsin, in order to obtain a Presidential appointment to West Point. Lincoln certainly wanted to please the key Union Democrat in Wisconsin, but he had already used up his available presidential appointments to West Point for 1862, so he promised Arthur, Jr. an appointment in 1863.
However, Arthur, Jr. at 17, could no longer wait to join the U.S. Army, in the midst of the Civil War, so his father arranged to have him appointed as Adjutant of the newly formed 24th Wisconsin regiment. Despite his young age and the initial skepticism of fellow officers and men about Arthur, Jr.’s leadership and fighting abilities, he proved to be a most exemplary leader and fighter in the midst of many difficult and bloody battles, leading the 24th up Missionary Ridge in Tennessee, for which he was later in life awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. He participated in the famous flanking battles of Sherman from Tennessee though Georgia to seize Atlanta, becoming by the war’s end reportedly the youngest Lieutenant Colonel in the Union Army.
After the Civil War, Arthur, Jr. re-enlisted in the Army, and served for a long time guarding the frontier as Lincoln’s transcontinental railroad was built across the nation. In his spare time, he read extensively on political and military history, political economy, and on the culture and civilization of Asia, esp. China, convinced that Asia was to be the next frontier of the American Republic’s influence.
The U.S. Army obviously took note of Arthur’s intellectual accomplishments, since an Adjutant General’s report noted the had made a “comparison of the American and English constitutions”, an “extensive investigation into the civilization and institutions of China”, and a study of the economist of the American System Henry Carey in contrast to the British imperial economists Malthus, Ricardo and John Stuart Mill, among numerous other economists and historians. [7]
During the Spanish-American War, Arthur, Jr. was assigned to the Philippines, where he took a leading role in fighting the Filipino insurrection against American rule, after the Americans had defeated the Spanish. He eventually became Military Governor, but he refused the demands of those who insisted that he treat the Filipinos harshly, as colonial and inferior subjects.
To quote his biographer Kenneth Ray Young, “Benevolent and humanitarian action was needed to win the enduring friendship of the great mass of Filipinos. MacArthur believed that the Filipinos should be in charge of building their country, and he did not want to interfere with their culture or customs, an attitude his son Douglas would later share in regard to the Japanese. He hoped that they would regard the United States as a protector rather than as a conqueror.” Instead of deporting captured Republican leaders to Guam, or confiscating their property, as was demanded by the civilian Commissioner William Howard Taft, Arthur “wanted to treat captured Republican leaders with respect and to hold out the hand of peace…The Filipinos were not to be treated as slaves nor exploited; rather, they would be treated as all citizens of the United States were treated.”[8]
Arthur MacArthur’s success in winning the respect and friendship of the Filipinos is demonstrated in the admiration which leading supporters of the rebellion later had for his son Douglas, and the support for the United States by most Filipinos during the war with Japan. One of the Republican soldiers who had fought MacArthur and later surrendered, Manuel Quezon, would later become President of the Philippine Commonwealth and a staunch friend of Douglas.
Arthur believed that the United States should prepare the Filipinos for early assumption of their own sovereignty in opposition to the pro-British Empire imperialists and racists such as Wall Street’s Secretary of War Elihu Root and the British agent who assumed the Presidency, Teddy Roosevelt, after the British-orchestrated assassination of the great patriotic President William McKinley. These Wall Street circles wanted indefinite retention of the Philippines as an American colony, to be exploited for cheap labor, and argued that the Filipinos were incapable of self-government. In testimony before a Senate hearing on the question of U.S. policy toward the Philippines, after he had ended his position as Military Governor, Arthur stated, “The principle end to be attained by the retention of the Philippine Islands is the initiation and promulgation of republican principles…I do not think there is a question about the power of the Filipino to reach any standard of excellence in almost any direction.”
Arthur, Jr’s view of the role of America in promulgating republican principles in Asia is quoted by his son Douglas in his Reminiscences, because it clearly guided his own thinking in his later role in the occupation of Japan. This view of Arthur’s is also identical to the view of the martyred President McKinley, whose speech at the onset of the Philippine rebellion is also quoted by Douglas in his memoirs, where McKinley emphatically states, “No imperial designs lurk in the American mind. They are alien to American sentiment, thought, and purpose, “ a speech which profoundly affected Douglas at the time. This is Arthur MacArthur’s description of that liberating and anti-imperialist role which America must play in Asia:
“The grand central idea of our presence in the Philippines is the fact that we are carrying to that people those imperishable ideas which have slowly evolved through many centuries of human aspirations. There are two things that lie close to the human heart. The one is the hope for a degree of personal liberty, and the other is for immortality. The first has slowly evolved and emerged from the strife of centuries and has found its full development in the United States. The idea of personal liberty allows a citizen to do within just limits whatever tends to his own happiness. That idea we are planting in the Orient. Wherever the American flag goes that idea goes. The fruition of that idea in the Philippines is merely a matter of evolution; and to my mind, a brief one. The Filipinos want precisely what we can give them. The planting of liberty – not money – is what we seek. The human race has propagated its higher ideals in a succession of waves, and now its waves are passing beyond the Pacific.”
Because of General Arthur MacArthur’s defense of republican principles, he was viewed as an enemy by Wall Street’s Elihu Root and Teddy Roosevelt, who deliberately refused to make Arthur Army Chief of Staff, when the General Staff system was introduced into the U.S. military, even though Arthur at the time was the highest ranking U.S. general and clearly the most qualified U.S. military leader at the time. But the British imperial allies in the U.S. opposed him, as they would his son Douglas.
The British Oppose MacArthur
General Douglas MacArthur knew that the British played the key role in orchestrating the various attacks against him in the post-war period, because the British establishment wanted to destroy the kind of American System policies MacArthur represented. According to MacArthur’s confidante General Courtney Whitney, in the years before the Korean War, “In Tokyo, MacArthur found constant British efforts to exploit the Japanese people one of the principal obstacles to his program for restoring Japan’s shattered economy…It was quite apparent…that British influence, both official and unofficial, was being more and more concentrated against MacArthur’s unflinching determination to protect American and Japanese interests from undue pressures or exploitation.” The British clearly wanted to prevent the kind of American “grand design”MacArthur envisioned for Asia and intended to destroy the American prestige that MacArthur had established there. Whitney, writing on behalf of General MacArthur, as we have already indicated), insists that the British conspired to remove MacArthur from Japan, long before the Korean War, because of General MacArthur’s principled opposition to Japan being placed under “subservience to British finance”, which points to this larger purpose:
“…”The strongest advocates of measures designed to put permanent restrictions upon Japan’s industrial capacity, the British also sought desperately to bring Japan within the orbit of the ‘sterling bloc’; this would automatically impose price controls upon raw materials and finished products by placing limitations on the convertibility of local currencies. MacArthur refused to countenance placing Japan under such subservience to British finance, at least as long as the American people were subsidizing Japan’s recovery with American dollars. The British did not give up easily, however, and it is a matter of historical interest that not many months before MacArthur was finally recalled from Japan in 1951, one of Britain’s senior representatives informally told him that the British government was exerting every possible pressure upon Washington to have him removed from Asia.” ,[9]
Even before the Korean War, the Anglo-American elites wanted MacArthur removed from Japan, because with his enormous prestige and power, he stood in the way of their plans for looting Asia, as well as in their plans for using the U.S. military to establish a new global empire. For example, in 1949, Fortune magazine, run by fascist Henry Luce, who would play a key role in destroying American culture through the so-called Congress of Cultural Freedom attacked MacArthur for supposedly preventing Japan’s economy from recovering, through excessive “bureaucratic controls”, in violation of “free trade” and “private enterprise“. Fortune compared the bureaucratic regulations of SCAP, designed to prevent carpet bagging, with FDR’s New Deal, which Luce bitterly opposed.
MacArthur biographer William Manchester has noted, “Because MacArthur wanted what one observer called ‘an absolutely immaculate occupation,’ he sharply limited the profit foreign traders could take out of the country,” which obviously enraged Henry Luce and his friends, in the same way that FDR’s measures for the general welfare did. [10]
Further evidence of the Anglo-Americans’ campaign in the late ’40’s to remove MacArthur from Asia, because of his promotion of the American System, is provided by George Kennan in his attacks on MacArthur in his memoirs. Kennan, an anglophile “Liberal Imperialist” in the State Department who admired the British “balance of power” “Great Game”, opposed FDR‘s post-war plans for global economic development as well as MacArthur‘s brilliant occupation policy. As charge d’affairs at the American Embassy under Averill Harriman after World War II, who was so close to the British that he once joked with his counterpart at the British Embassy in Moscow that they could save money by consolidating into one embassy, Kennan was the putative author of the “containment” doctrine, designed to pit the U.S. and Russia into a Cold War.
As head of the State Department policy Planning Staff under Secretary of State General George Marshall, he helped oversee the recruitment of former Nazis into U.S. intelligence. He emphasized the need to lie and deceive through psychological and cultural warfare to supposedly “beat the communists at their own game” through the use of the “necessary lie”.
This method of lying is no better seen than in Kennan’s hysterical attacks on MacArthur’s occupation policy in Japan. He claims in his memoirs that in 1947 as head of the State Department Policy Planning Staff he circulated the preposterous view that MacArthur’s occupation policies, such as his attacks on the Zaibatsu industrial combines, his promotion of labor unions, his land reforms, his abolition of a central national police, and his abolition of war as a policy, opened up Japan to communist takeover! To quote Kennan:
“…She (Japan) had no effective means of combating the Communist penetration and political pressure that was already vigorously asserting itself under the occupation and could be depended upon to increase greatly if the occupation was removed and American forces withdrawn. In the face of this situation the nature of the occupational policies pursued up to that time by general MacArthur’s headquarters seemed on cursory examination to be such that if they had been devised for the specific purpose of rendering Japanese society vulnerable to Communist politic political pressures and paving the way for a Communist takeover, they could scarcely have been what they were.” [11]
Kennan even laughingly accused MacArthur of using the “ideological concepts” of communism, because “Liberal imperialist“ that he was, he had no understanding of the “American System“: “The ideological concepts on which these measures rested bore so close a resemblance to Soviet views about the evils of ‘capitalist monopolies’ that the measures themselves could only have been eminently agreeable to anyone interested in the future communization of Japan. Their relation to the interests of Japanese recovery was less apparent.”
Here MacArthur is attacked by a leading Liberal Imperialist as “promoting Communism”! Yet, the liberals during and after the Korean War attacked General MacArthur for trying to start World War III, because of his fanatical “anti-communism”. What is really going on here? We shall attempt to answer that question in a forthcoming article on MacArthur’s role in the Korean war, when his biggest enemy was actually the British Empire .
Footnotes
[1]. See EIR , William C. Jones, “Commanders Opposed Truman on Hiroshima”, EIR, Volume 29, Number 31, p. 26
[2]. Lincoln Second Inaugural Address
[3]. Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences, McGraw-Hill, New York, 1964, p. 277. Most of the quotes from MacArthur about his ideas regarding the Occupation are from this book.
[4]. William Manchester, American Caesar, Dell Publishing Co., New York, 1978, p. 560
[5]. Maj. General Courtney Whitney, MacArthur: His Rendezvous With History, Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1956, p. 267
[6]. Kenneth Ray Young, The General’s General: The Life and Times of Arthur MacArthur, Westview Press, Boulder, 1994. p. 17. Most of the information and quotesabout Judge Arthur MacArthur, Sr. and General Arthur MacArthur, Jr. is from this book.
[7]. Manchester, pp. 36-37
[8]. Young, pp. 265-266
[9]. Whitney, pp. 301-302
[10]. Manchester, p. 582
[11]. George F. Kennan, Memoirs:1925-1950, Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1967, p. 388
