Taking the Extremists Seriously

Back in 1975, I was a new student at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I wandered through the library, enthralled by the huge number of books. Guided by my interest in Japan, I ended up in the World War Two history section. I found a book by Otto D. Tolischus, Through Japanese Eyes. Written during the war, the book used the words of the leaders of the Japanese Empire to show that they were every bit as bad as the Nazis and deserved no better treatment from us after their inevitable defeat.

But I also found a book entitled, Are Germans Human? I am quite sure I saw this book, though I can find no online record of it. The author answered his own question: “Are Germans human? Probably not.” His reasoning was that Nazi leaders could spend the day committing mass killings, then go home at night and speak lovingly to their caged birds. Could a single human contain such different feelings at the same time?

The frightening thing is that, yes, people can be good at one time and bad another. Germans today are very peaceful and polite, and even during Nazi times most Germans were not true, converted Nazis. But enough of them were that they produced the greatest evil in history. Moreover, the same individual human being can be loving at one moment and bloodthirsty the next.

The brief conclusion I want to draw, following on the last two entries, is that we should not assume that extreme right-wing people are, despite what they say, actually very nice people and could not possibly rise up and damage or destroy society. Paul Harvey would not have been violent, nor would James Miller. But today, thousands of right-wingers openly display threats of violence. We see them wear camouflage, mask their faces, and bring their weapons to protests. We think they could not possibly turn their guns against the rest of us. While this may be true, we must remember that the slightest perceived insult might cause otherwise nice rednecks to take the actions that they say they are ready to take. Even if only, say, ten percent of right-wing extremists become violent, America might be so severely disrupted that it cannot survive in a hostile world.

My point is simple. We should not dismiss the extremists by saying, “Oh, they wouldn’t actually use those weapons.”

Silent Struggles of Faith in the Novels of Shusaku Endo

I very much appreciate, and hope you get a chance to read, the thoughtful novels of the Japanese Christian writer Shusaku Endo, which include Silence (which Scorsese made into a movie) and The Samurai. Both of these novels are about Catholic missionaries in Japan right before, or during, the persecution of Christians in Japan after 1600. These are thoughtful novels, neither championing nor condemning Christianity. I consider Endo to have been Japan’s answer to Graham Greene (The Power and the Glory and Monseigneur Quixote), or the other way around.

In both of the Endo novels that I have read, European and Japanese Christians look to God for guidance, and receive only silence in response. Endo wrote, “In the thick darkness God is silent.” Many of us have had this experience.

The historical background of The Samurai was when the shogunate (military dictatorship) of Japan sent a delegation of minor samurai, with the Spanish Franciscan priest Luis Sotelo, to open up trade relations with New Spain, a trip that eventually took them to Spain and to the Vatican in 1613. Immediately thereafter, persecution nearly eradicated Christianity from Japan. The samurai from whose viewpoint much of the novel is written, Hasekura Rokuemon, was a real person. He kept a journal, but it has been last. Most of what we think we know about this delegation comes from Sotelo’s obviously self-centered and unreliable account of the journey. He thought he would be single-handedly responsible for the salvation of Japan. He was sure he would become the Bishop of Japan. Since Hasekura’s account has been lost, we have to fill in the details with imagination, which Endo did in this novel.

The one thing we know for sure is that neither the Catholic priests nor the Japanese had simple and clear motivations. The priest, as depicted by Endo in the character of Father Velasco, is sincere in his desire to serve the Japanese, even if it means losing his life, but he was also ambitious. The Japanese—the three samurai, their attendants, and the merchants—converted to Christianity by just going through the motions so that they could establish trade contacts with Christian countries, but at the end the Japanese wondered if maybe this Jesus, this ugly beat-up Jesus hanging from crucifixes, actually did love them, he who had died even more miserably than they. Jesus, they speculated, was a miserable dog who shares our miseries.

Here are some quotes that beautifully illustrate this last point. The samurai Nishi speaks to Hasekura: “I can believe in Him now because the life He lived in this world was more wretched than any other man’s. Because He was ugly and emaciated. He knew all there was to know about the sorrows of the world. He could not close His eyes to the grief and agony of mankind...Do you think He is to be found within those garish [European] cathedrals? He does not dwell there...I think He lives in the wretched homes of those [Native American] Indians...That is how He lived His life. He never visited the houses of those who were puffed up or contented. He sought out only the ugly, the wretched, the miserable, and the sorrowful. But now even the bishops and priests are complacent and swollen with pride. They are no longer the sort of people He sought after...Those who weep seek someone to lend an ear to their lamentations. No matter how much the world changes, those who weep and those who lament will always seek Him. That is His purpose in living.” [Chapter 9]

Endo also alerts us to the rivalry between Jesuits and Franciscans for access to Japan, before the shogunate shut them both out.

This novel is tragic (not unlike Silence and Scorsese’s adaptation of it). Toward the end, the Japanese samurai discover that their whole journey had been a trick on the part of their overlords, that not only was the failure of the journey but the execution of the samurai were planned from the very beginning. One of the feudal lords had tolerated Christianity, but the shogun hated Christianity, and the feudal lord had to do something to prove to the shogun that he was serious about eradicating Christianity from Japan—by executing a samurai who had, however insincerely, converted to Christianity.

The feeling I take away from the two Endo novels I have read is that no religious question has an easy and straightforward answer.

Respecting our Heritage

After those emails from Hell, anything I write as a straight essay has got to be a let-down. But get used to it! It’s time to get back to having a reg’lar blog.

I respect my heritage. My great-great grandfather fought on the Confederate side in the Civil War. I respect him. But that doesn’t mean I have to celebrate that particular aspect of his life. I don’t know much else about him, except that he was one of six husbands of Minerva Pettit, who cheated on him. He was a farmer in Indian Territory. I don’t think he owned slaves. I think I can respect his memory for other reasons. Even as recently as the generation just before mine, nearly all the members of my family on both sides were racists, sometimes to an alarming extent (although their abuse of blacks was only verbal, as far as I know). I can hate this part of my heritage, even while respecting the many good aspects of their characters.

But in Oklahoma, where I live—especially in the town of Tushka, a few miles north of where I work, a town that has two Confederate flag roadside stands, and where they proudly declare themselves to be Confederates rather than Americans—hundreds of thousands of people (a significant minority of our population of three million) worship the Confederate flag.

What are other people around the world to make of this? They can be excused for thinking that a significant number of Americans still yearn for the days of slavery.

Of course the Confederates were not as evil as the Nazis. But today in Germany you seldom if ever see a swastika or Nazi flag. As a matter of fact, such insignia virtually disappeared right after the War. The Third Reich is part of German history, and they preserve its memory, but they do not celebrate it. They have, collectively as a nation, repented of their evil past. What would you think if, all over rural Germany, you saw Nazi flags waving?

If anything, the Imperial Japanese were worse than the Nazis. But today you almost never see—perhaps never; I don’t know—the Imperial Japanese flag with red rays coming out of the red sun. The Empire of the Sun, the mythic land of Hakkō Ichiyū, is part of the historical heritage of Japan, but they do not celebrate it. They have, collectively as a nation, repented of their evil past. Just recently the prime minister of Japan apologized to South Korea for some events during what they called the Greater East Asian Conflict, which began with the Japanese annexation of Korea. What would you think if, all over rural Japan, you saw Imperial flags waving?

I stopped at a Confederate museum north of Tushka. It had old stuff in it like most museums. But it did not celebrate the Confederacy. It simply preserved its memory. Unlike my stressful visit with a Confederate flag salesman (described in an earlier entry), to whom the Confederacy was an important part of the present, this museum considered the Confederacy to be part of the past. I enjoyed this museum. I have to agree with South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley (see, I sometimes agree with Southern Republicans) that the Confederate flag belongs in a museum.

Germany and Japan have repented. The Confederate States of America has not. The former Confederacy is defiant. That is our shame in the eyes of the world.

Emails from Hell, part eight.

Here is another email I received from our correspondent in Hell. Guess whom he meets this time!

{beginning of email}

            “HUT, two, three, four, HUT, two, three, four…” The man, wearing what appeared to be a World War Two American Army uniform, marched along. As he drew closer, I saw that his simple uniform bore a lot of insignia. He turned and saluted us—me and John and Joe and some others—and kept marching.

            Curious, I called out to the man. He stopped, at attention, then turned in military style toward me. “At ease,” he commanded himself. Then he slouched a little and sauntered over to us. He sat down.

            “You wouldn’t mind telling me who you are, would you?” I asked.

            “MacArthur, Douglas, General, serial number 3-point-14159.”

            “A nice round number,” John whispered to me.

            “If captured, we can only tell the enemy our name, rank, and serial number, which they can read off of our dog tags,” said General McArthur.

            “I would say I was surprised to see you here, General, but I just finished speaking with the pope. You were one of the most famous men in American history, but coming right after His Holiness…”

            “Right.”

            “Well, sir, might you tell me why you are down here in Hell?”

            “I served at the command of a socialist president, for one thing,” the general said.

            “Ah, yes. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, author of Social Security, the New Deal, and lots of social services. I assume I will meet him sooner or later. Socialist as he was, he was so popular that he had to die to get out of office, and Americans had to add an amendment to the constitution to keep it from happening again. Four terms! You said, for one thing. What other reason?”

            “I was the Supreme Allied Commander in Asia,” he said. “Eisenhower’s counterpart.”

            “Yes. Go on.”

            “In August of 1945, the Empire of Japan surrendered unconditionally.”

            “Yes, they did. Soon afterwards, the Japanese people heard the voice of an Emperor, for the first time in history, telling them they had to accept this defeat. Go on.”

            “Unconditionally,” said the General.

            “Your point?”

            “That means that our troops could have run all over the place raping and pillaging to their hearts’ content.”

            “But,” I said, “they didn’t. Two reasons. First, they were for the most part humanitarians, and they did not want to act like madmen. Second, you commanded them not to. At first, some of the American soldiers consorted with Japanese women, but not, as I understand, by force. But then even that stopped. But what I don’t get is how that landed you in Hell.”

            “Well, I disobeyed the Bible,” said the general. “In Deuteronomy 7:2, God commanded the Israelites to show no mercy to the inhabitants of the conquered land, to utterly slaughter them, and to make no treaties with them. I disobeyed all of those commands. We showed mercy to the Japanese, and even helped them start their economy back up. We made treaties with them and even wrote their constitution for them. This constitution included a provision that they would not have an army capable of fighting outside of Japan itself, a provision that persisted until the year 2016.”

            “But, sir!” exclaimed I. “That was a brilliant move! Japan grew rapidly and became one of America’s best allies, which was important for our security and for world peace! Why, sir! They loved you! When you said you wanted to run for president, some of them put up campaign banners for you! The banners said…”

            “Yes, I know,” said the General. “They said, we play for your erection.” John started laughing but the General said, “No, seriously, they did. But great idea or no, it was a direct violation of God’s command.”

            “In the Old Testament, not the New,” I said.

            “The fundamentalists who get to choose who goes to Heaven and who doesn’t use Old Testament rules,” the general reminded me.

{end of email}

Today in the News

The last essay was about the absence of any kind of discernible God in the things that happen on Earth. Some of the best examples of this are the natural disasters, such as the earthquake and tsunami in Indonesia in 2004, the earthquake in Haiti in 2010, and the ongoing devastation caused by the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, right now.

A massive, 8.9 magnitude earthquake caused a tsunami (which is a Japanese word) about thirty feet high which, within minutes, had destroyed entire coastal areas in Japan on Friday, March 11. The news about it in America was rather spotty because we were worried about a wave, maybe a foot high, reaching Hawaii and California. After we were finished worrying about getting our feet wet, we started noticing the devastation in Japan. There were two thousand bodies on the shore just in Miyagi Prefecture. Thousands of people are homeless, many of them outdoors in near freezing conditions with just a blanket. Almost certainly, the death toll would have been as great as that in Indonesia (or as great as the Kanto Earthquake that hit Japan in 1923) were it not for the fact that Japan is the nation most prepared to deal with earthquakes and tsunamis. They were as ready as anybody could be. Which is to say, they were not ready. They are humans facing an overwhelmingly indifferent Earth.

There is no ultimate reason for events like this. It resulted simply from the fact that Japan, which was built by volcanoes, is near a place where one plate of the Earth’s crust slips underneath another one. In this location, perhaps a thousand years of pressure had built up. It was just geology operating in supreme indifference to the presence or absence of humans. It is ludicrous for us to try to figure out why God would permit this. Pat Robertson said that God allowed (caused?) the earthquake in Haiti to punish the people for the practice of voodoo. Robertson arrogantly assumes that he knows the entire mind of God. Blasphemous shithead. But aren’t many other religious people equally blasphemous for speculating that God must have had a reason for it? They think they know the mind of God, and that God must have been superintending the events in Japan these past few days. But maybe there is no reason; maybe it was just geology.

In other news: this is the birthday of President Andrew Jackson, born in 1767. Delusionary patriots consider him to be a beacon of democracy, but Cherokees know different. He used the United States army to forcibly remove the Cherokees from our homeland in what is now Georgia, North Carolina, and Tennessee, defying the United States Supreme Court to do so. This makes him, constitutionally, a military dictator. During the course of the nineteenth century, the United States government broke hundreds of treaties with sovereign Native American nations, but only Andrew Jackson defied the Supreme Court to do so. The resulting Trail of Tears was not just a tragedy of suffering for the Cherokees; it was a tragedy for the American constitution. Jackson’s face on the $20 bill is the symbol of the American economy to the world; and it is the face of evil. We should get the face of that arrogant bastard off of our currency. Jackson makes Richard Nixon look like a saint.

Tomorrow (March 15) is the anniversary of the My Lai massacre. In 1968, some American soldiers deliberately killed a village of civilians in Vietnam. At least this was widely considered to be a criminal act; the Wounded Knee massacre in 1890 was considered to be a legitimate act of the United States government. Maybe we are getting a little bit more ethical; at least we no longer try to kill civilians, in Afghanistan, and the My Lai massacre was unusual (though apparently not unique) during the Vietnam War.

Oh, BTW, have a nice day.