Abe trampling history

Abe has created the dangerous atmosphere in which such things can happen. He is pressing systematically to abandon Japan's pacifist Constitution and to "update" legislation that mandates a neutral approach to education as opposed to the system of militarism, and fanatical and unquestioning obedience that was used in the 1930s to prepare the Japanese people for their unprecedented aggression and systematic war crimes against Northeast and Southeast Asian countries.

Abe's government has even announced plans to try and get the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization to officially list - and therefore validate and honor - more than 200 letters written by Japanese suicide kamikaze pilots during WWII and now are stored in Minamikyushu city, giving them a status comparable to that of Holocaust victim Anne Frank's diary and England's Magna Carta. The thousands of victims of the kamikaze attacks, it should be remembered, were all Americans, combat sailors of the US Navy.

The seriousness and dangers of these initiatives cannot be over-estimated. They have clearly been approved and coordinated at the highest level of the Japanese government. And they are dangerous for Japan, too.

In 1834, almost a century before Adolf Hitler and his Nazis seized power in Germany, Heinrich Heine, one of the greatest German poets and essayists, warned that ancient, barbaric Germany's primeval love of war would one day rise again. And when that happened, he wrote, "the frenzied madness of the ancient warriors, that insane berserk rage of which Nordic bards have spoken and sung so often, will once more burst into flame".

A nation's mind has to be conditioned before it goes berserk in its madness to conquer half the world, Heine warned. "Do not smile at the visionary who anticipates the same revolution in the realm of the visible as has taken place in the spiritual," he wrote. "Thought precedes action as lightning precedes thunder."

Heine's warnings echo in Tokyo today. Abe and his supporters on the NHK board are not just playing with lightning, they are also unleashing forces whose destructive power they seem incapable of imagining.

The author is chief global analyst for The Globalist and a senior fellow of the American University in Moscow, and author of Shifting Superpowers: The New and Emerging Relationship between the United States, China and India.

(China Daily 02/19/2014 page9)