Evidence of the resurgence of the nationalist style
in politics

In India Narendra Modi, who is often
referred to as a Hindu nationalist, won a sweeping general-election
victory.

Nationalist parties made big gains in
the elections to the European Parliament, with France’s National Front and
Britain’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) topping the polls.
Scottish nationalists came unnervingly
close to winning a referendum on independence from the United Kingdom.
Nationalist rhetoric also surged in
Vladimir Putin’s Russia, as the Kremlin rallied domestic support for the
annexation of Crimea by using the Russian media to portray the outside
world as hostile, even fascist.

 

Fuel for fire

A widespread disillusion with political
and business elites, after years of disappointing economic growth, is a
common factor that underpins resurgent nationalism across the globe.
In western Europe the added ingredient
is anger at high levels of immigration.
In Russia it is lingering humiliation
about the collapse of the Soviet Union and nostalgia for great-power
status.
In Asia the extra spice is a shifting
balance of power that has encouraged nations such as China and South Korea
to focus on historical grievances, particularly against Japan.
In America outrage at the growth of Islamic
State has begun to stoke an appetite for a return to a more assertive and
militarised foreign policy ? ELECTION OF dONald j trUMp

 

Impact of Russian Nationalism

The most serious threat to the stability
of Europe, however, remains Russian nationalism.
The biggest security question facing
Europe—and perhaps the world—will be whether President Putin rides the
nationalist wave he has helped to create, and continues to threaten
Ukraine and even the Baltic states.
The resurgence of nationalist politics will
make 2015 a bad year for international co-operation.
The EU will struggle to agree on the
measures needed to revive Europe’s economy and to deal with Russia.
Russia itself will be increasingly
marginalised. That will make it hard to achieve agreement at the UN on
everything from the Middle East to climate-change negotiations. The
globalised economic system will survive the revival of nationalism in
2015, but co-operation between nations will nosedive.

 

Japanese
Nationalism

Japan’s Amnesia
For Its War Crimes

·        
The Rape of Nanking:

o   
In 1937, Japanese soldiers invaded and massacred
260,000 people; raped women, impaled babies with bayonets and fed the starving
food laced with lethal bacteria

o    Hundreds of
thousands of Korean women forcibly brought over to serve in brothels on the
frontlines of Japanese wars as comfort women

o    More than 2.85
million Chinese civilians died in the war at the hands of Japan’s sanko
seisaku (three-all policy: burn all, kill all, destroy all)

o    This massacre
is commonly publicly denied by various japanese politicians, who continue to
undermine apologies by questioning the historical records

o    Novelist Naoki
Hyakuta, friend of Prime minister shinzo Abe called the Rape of Nanking
“propaganda” and that “there was no such thing”

o    China denounced
the claims as “a barefaced challenge to international justice and human
conscience”

 

·        
Tokyo Trials:

o    After the war
ended, the International Military Tribunal for the Far East found Japan’s
soldiers guilty of war crimes; deemed as unfair by the japanese due to the
composition of the tribunals and the atomic bombings

o    The San
Francisco Peace treaty was signed to return sovereignty to Japan, but the new
government was required to execute all its war criminals

o    This was
heavily petitioned against as the trialled prisoners detailed illegalities in
the trials and alleged that they had been tortured in jail in a book series
called Records of Historical Truth: The War Trials

o    Tokyo
renegotiated with the allies to unanimously amend the law to recognise those
who had been executed as war casualties and not war criminals, while others
were freed from jail

o    This confirmed
the popular imagination that the trials had meted out a victor’s justice (carrying out
“justice” on an entity’s own basis of applying different rules to
judge what is right or wrong for their own forces and for those of the (former)
enemy), and that the nation had not really been guilty of war crimes

·        
Yaksukuni Shrine:

o    All the people
who died in wars under the emperor are memorialised, including those who died
in world war II

o    13 Class-A war
criminals are buried there

o    The war victims
are somewhat seen as war heroes and are revered and worshipped for their
sacrifice to the emperor

 

Loss of
National Identity

·        
Meiji Restoration of 1860: Japan underwent a
massive transformation,where the powerful emperor rapidly educated the people,
grew the economy and built up a massive army. Japan became an economic and
military powerhouse in just a few years and engage in aggressive expansionism

·        
Japan was occupied by America, under the rule of
supreme General Douglas MacArthur, who wrote japan a new constitution
forbidding Japan from ever waging war again, stripped the Emperor Hirohito of
all power and dismantled the military.

·        
The symbolism of the memorials all point to a
glorification of the imperial period, which was what japanese felt was lost
after World War II, and that they were stripped of the national values and
pride thousands of years in the making

 

Nationalism and
Right Wing Support

·        
Exit polls in the 2014 Tokyo governor election
showed a rising support for the right wing among the young in japan

·        
Nationalist Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has
surrounded himself with ministers and advisors from fringe groups promoting the
restoration of Japan’s pre World War II glory ? calls for restoration of strong
military, call for the deportation of koreans and limitation to immigration,
similar to other nationalist movements around the globe (Marine Le Pen’s running
for president, Donald Trump’s America First Policy)

 

            Impact
on Bilateral Relations

·        
Beijing and Tokyo are locked in an escalating
squabble over the control of some desolate islands(Diaoyu/Senkaku islands) with
armed ships from both countries playing a dangerous game of chicken on the
waters offshore while Japan is caught in a separate island spat with South
Korea

·        
The real source of the bitterness has little to do
with the islands themselves but the legacy of what happened in the region
during the first half of the 20th century ? rapidly modernising japan set out
to establish itself against imperial European powers by brutally carving out
and exploiting an empire of its own in Korea, Northern China and elsewhere; yet
japan is not properly apologising or even acknowledging its atrocious war
crimes

·        
The best thing that could happen for asia today
would be for japan to apologise once and for all in a clear, comprehensive and
unnuanced manner

·        
Democratic germany has profited enormously from its
open, non-defensive approach to the country’s past, and democratic japan would
as well

·        
Japan victims should press to have their legitimate
grievances comprehensively addressed and move on, as France, Russia and Israel
have done with the Third Reich’s descendants

 

Syrian Refugee
Crisis

sYRIA booom  assad bad ppl run on boats go to
mama merkel boom in syria continue isis come assad still alive

He a bad man