FATHER FRANK’S RANTS - Cunning of Reason

Rant Number 506

I possess a curious broach. It shows the emblems of three nations. The Rising Sun of Japan, the Italian Tricolour cum the shield of the House of Savoy and the German flag – alas, it has a swastika – awful but historically correct.

The broach was meant to commemorate the alliance of the three nations in WWII. The three powers pact, also called the tripartite pact. Signed in Berlin in 1940. The German signatory was Hitler but the Emperor of Japan stayed in Tokyo. Mussolini too did not shift his bum from Rome but send his falsetto-voiced, pro-British & ill-fated foreign minister, Ciano, to do the deed. Could have been called an early, nice example of alliance of civilisations, I suppose.

The pact must have been a bit ideologically hard to swallow for the Germans. They managed to rustle up an obscure racial professor who claimed to prove the Japanese were Aryans: no one believed it. Goering joked that he had dubbed them ‘honorary Germans’. Wonder how honoured the Japanese felt...

The alliance was a kind of adjunct to the previous Pact against the Communist International, the Komintern. Aimed at counteracting the intrigues of worldwide Marxism, aka the Soviet Union. Pact made obsolete by the later, cynical deal between Germany and Russia, the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact. The Japanese, coveting the Soviet Far East, had been annoyed. The Tripartite Pact was a way of pacifying them. It did the Mikado boys no good, alas.

Germany had basically two allies of real significance in WWII. One, Japan, was militarily good and worthy but it was too far-away to be helpful. Italy was the other one. Militarily, Italy was a fiasco. If anything, it hindered Germany. If Mussolini had opted for siding with England he would have helped Hitler more, by saddling the English with an incompetent ally. The Fuhrer’s astrologers should have worked that one out...

Had Hitler been really Machiavellian, he could still have turned the tables on his enemies. After Pearl Harbour, America was at war with Japan but not with Germany. Roosevelt still had to find a way to get Congress to approve war in Europe. Hitler solved his difficulties with a stroke by declaring war on America first.

It was a mega-mistake. As British historian AJP Taylor suggests, Hitler could have invoked Aryan solidarity with a nation of basic German stock, and declared war on an alien Asiatic race, the Japanese. A hard one for Roosevelt to get through!

Why didn’t Hitler do that? Again, Taylor says that it was loyalty. Hitler was loyal to his Far-East allies. To his and his nation’s ruination. Political naivety, to say the least. Neither Germany nor Japan prospered as a result. Germany was turned into a heap of rubbles, Japan nuked, occupied and re-educated into embracing Yankee values – cultural genocide perhaps? Discuss.

Sounds like ancient history? Not really. Of the three nations on my broach one survives as a jolly museum, Italy, but then nothing new there. Italy has been a museum for centuries – the land of the dead, as Lamartine called it. Fascism, its dreams of power were an absurdity, justly forgotten. Italians are not that sort. The two other nations, however...a different matter.

Germany is now the main power in Europe. Galling to Germanophobes, isn’t it? Everyone admits it. Men like the infamous Morgenthau at the war’s end wanted to turn Germany back into a country of hewers of wood and drawers of water. Maybe Morgenthau foresaw and feared that Germany’s destiny is to rule. He was right. Economically or otherwise, the point is the same. You cannot keep a good country, a valiant people down. Like the phoenix, Germany arose from its ashes and now excels its old, rancorous and petty rival, England: the cunning of Reason!

It is the same with Japan. Nuked it was and culturally and morally devastated it, too. My friend Sinji, a nice Japanese artist I met in Tehran’s Antiquity Museum, apprised me of the dire details. American instructors went into Japanese classroom after the war and told the teachers what to teach. Japanese war crimes had to be taught but the atom bombing of Japan had to be passed over in silence. Huh!

Japan’s destiny too is to rule. You can’t be the country of the Samurais for nothing. Call it romantic bunkum, it is a fact. Cow boys beat the Samurais OK in WWII but the Samurais will be back.

The pathetic little islands now igniting conflicts between China and Japan of course are not the point. Who will dominate the Far-East is the question. It cannot be China. China has always been conquered by others. It does not have the imperial vocation. Japan has. China will have to concede.

Japan’s Army is derisory. It was forced to keep it that way by the victors. America is supposed to be its military protector. Hopefully, the nonsense of this will stimulated the Japanese in getting themselves a proper Army. It is not just the economy, stupid. Military power is a necessity. Reason ad history demand it.

Cunning of Reason (capital ‘R’, in suitably philosophical lingo) is what the great German thinker Hegel in the Phenomenology of History calls the action of Reason ‘when it sets the passions to work for itself’. But there is also Necessity. It is necessary that Japan should rule over China. Hate is as much as you like, the future belongs to the Rising Sun.

If you think this is a bit over the top, the priest should also explain that, in that order, a) he had a Japanese girl friend, Michiko, and, b) he was once a Zen master. I kid you not: just ask my disciple Shahin. He’ll vouchsafe for me. Hence I feel a part of me is kind of Japanese.

So, beneath it all, the passions now agitating the two Asian countries work towards accomplishing the march of Reason’s designs. The rising again of the eternal, glorious Japanese Sun. Banzai! Japan for ever!

Revd Frank Julian Gelli