by Ian Buruma
And so the Korean People’s Republic was doomed. What followed was a tragedy. The country would effectively be split into two, with Kim Il-sung in charge of the provisional Communist Party government in North Korea, and Rhee controlling the South. Keene’s Korean friends in Tsingtao soon proved to be more correct than even they could possibly have anticipated. The ghastly Korean War, started by an invasion from the North in 1950, ended in a stalemate after more than two million civilian deaths. Seoul, having survived World War II more or less intact, lay in ruins, as did Pyongyang in the North. The North continued to be ruled by a tyrannical quasi-imperial dynasty, and the South endured decades of military rule.
At the height of the Cold War, in 1961, a staunch anticommunist took power in South Korea by coup d’état. Following the Japanese wartime model of a planned economy under military rule, boosted by Korean zaibatsu operating in tandem with the government, the South Korean economy grew apace. The strongman in question had graduated in 1942 at the top of his class from the Manchukuo Military Academy in Shinkyo, and had been a lieutenant in the Japanese Kwantung Army. In 1948, he was expelled from the South Korean Army for taking part in a plot against Syngman Rhee. His Japanese name during the war was Takagi Masao. His real name was Park Chong-hee. One of his greatest Japanese supporters was Kishi Nobusuke, a fellow veteran of the Manchukuo puppet state.
• • •
UTOPIAN DREAMS ARE DESTINED to end in a junkyard of shattered illusions. But they don’t all end in the same way. And they tend to leave traces. New Jerusalem in Britain foundered on what John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of his time, called a “financial Dunkirk.” Keynes had hoped that Britain might have the benefit of U.S. aid—a constant supply of material goods on highly generous terms—under the Lend-Lease Act at least until the end of 1945. That would have given the government some time to stave off bankruptcy. Failing that, it was hard to see where the money would come from to plug the near-catastrophic balance of payments deficit, let alone to pay for Britain’s socialist dreams. Keynes prayed that “the Japanese would not let us down by surrendering too soon.”43
His hopes were dashed by the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that prompted the following entry in Harold Nicolson’s diary, describing the reaction of his wife, Vita Sackville-West: “Viti is thrilled by the atomic bomb. She thinks, and rightly, that it means a whole new era.”44
Japan’s war was over in August.
The misery of economic austerity, the rationing of goods that went on longer in Britain than in other countries, the endless queuing for meager services, the sheer dreariness of life, and the postwar fatigue coupled with the realization that Britain not only had depleted its treasury but was also rapidly losing its standing as a major power in the world, all this helped to deflate the spirit of optimism. Even though planning for public housing, education, culture, health, and full employment still went ahead, the nation’s finances were dire, and the enthusiasm of 1945 was quickly dissipated. Two years after the victories over Germany and Japan, the Labour chancellor Hugh Dalton wrote in his diary: “Never bright confident morning again.”45
In 1951 Winston Churchill was back as prime minister. The Labour Party had to wait another thirteen years for a second chance at governing, this time under Harold Wilson, who had been president of the Board of Trade in Attlee’s cabinet.
Similar things happened in other western European countries, where stability and continuity—normality of a kind—promised by Catholic and Christian Democratic parties eclipsed the revolutionary élan of the left. The Dutch social democrats lost power in 1956. General de Gaulle established the French Fifth Republic in 1958. The near hegemony of the Italian Christian Democratic Party began in 1948, much helped by American anticommunist propaganda and financial support. The first social democratic government in West Germany was elected only in 1969. In East Germany, the Social Democrats saw their dreams of working with the communists to build a better antifascist Germany collapse even before the German Democratic Republic was founded in 1949. Germans living in the Soviet zone stubbornly refused to support the Communist Party and much preferred the Social Democrats in 1945. As a result, in the following year, the Soviet authorities forced the east German Social Democrats to merge with the Communist Party, which quickly gobbled them up.
One way of looking at the demise of the noncommunist left in Korea, or indeed Japan, where socialist government lasted for exactly one year, from 1947 till 1948, is to blame it on the Cold War. The U.S. occupation authorities in East Asia may have been fumbling, and often conservative, but the Soviet Union was just as responsible for the debacle of the moderate left. Where the Soviets were in control, in North Korea as much as in eastern and central Europe, socialists were crushed.
Stalin did agree not to stir up revolutions in the American spheres of interest; French and Italian communists were told to forget their dreams of taking power. Indeed, the Italian communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, was rather a middle-of-the-road figure who avoided violent confrontations with conservatives, even though the right was still tainted by Mussolini’s legacy. But the United States and its conservative allies, in East and West, were so suspicious of communist intentions that they did everything they could to keep anything left-wing away from power. This was especially true in states on the front lines of the Cold War, which happened to be Germany, Italy, and Japan. From the late 1940s, Japan, like West Germany, had to be reconfigured as a bastion against communism. The New Deal enthusiasms of 1945 quickly vanished as military rearmament, industrial development, crackdowns on trade unions, “red purges” in the civil service and education, as well as active support of conservative politicians, some of whom only recently had been awaiting trials as war criminals, became the new policy. This so-called reverse course by the U.S. authorities, who had been so encouraging to the Japanese left at the start of the occupation, never ceased to be seen as a betrayal of the idealism of 1945.
And yet Hugh Dalton had been a little too pessimistic when he lamented the end of Britain’s “bright confident morning.” The ecstasy of liberation may have faded, but many of the institutions erected in that bright new start were not dismantled so quickly; some, for better or worse, have lasted to this day. Neither the Conservative governments in Britain, nor the Christian Democratic parties on the Continent, seriously attempted to tear down the foundations of European welfare states, conceived by prewar planners and idealistic members of the wartime resistance. In fact, Churchill’s Tories built more public housing than Attlee’s Labour Party. Many Christian Democrats were almost as suspicious of laissez-faire economics as were the socialists. The western European welfare systems began to corrode around the edges only in the 1970s, and, especially in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, to get seriously dented a decade later. The economies of Japan and South Korea, even compared to continental Europe, are still quite tightly controlled by government planners.
But the main monument of postwar planning is Europe itself, or rather the European Union, rotting and battered, yet still standing. In 1945, most people believed in European unity as a noble ideal. It had always appealed to Catholics, inspired by echoes of the Holy Roman Empire. Frenchmen and Francophiles liked the idea of Europe as a center of Western civilization, centered in Paris, that could stand up to the crass materialism of the United States. Socialists and other economic planners were drawn to Brussels, where essential institutions of the European Union are based, as the capital of a new technocracy. Above all, however, a united Europe would ensure that Europeans would never go to war with one another again. In this sense, at least, so far, the idealism of 1945 has paid off.
CHAPTER 8
CIVILIZING THE BRUTES
In 1943, Noël Coward wrote a song called “Don’t Let’s Be Beastly to the Germans,” which gave rise to misunderstandings. The song was briefly banned by the BBC for appearing to be too sympathetic to the enemy:
Don’t let’s be b
eastly to the Germans
When our victory is ultimately won,
It was just those nasty Nazis
Who persuaded them to fight,
And their Beethoven and Bach
Are really far worse than their bite!
In fact, as Coward carefully pointed out before singing his song onstage, the sting was aimed at “a small minority of humanitarians who in my view took rather too tolerant a view of our enemies.”
To say that the Allied occupations of Germany and Japan were carried out entirely in the spirit of such humanitarians would be an exaggeration, but not too much of one. For the occupations, at least in the first couple of years, were unique in their earnest endeavors not to exact revenge, but to reeducate, civilize, change hearts and minds, and turn dictatorships into peaceful democracies so that they would never wreak destruction on the world again.
In the beginning, it is true, there were plans, made in Washington mostly, to punish the former enemies and render them harmless by destroying any means of becoming modern industrial nations. As was already mentioned, the Morgenthau Plan, named after Henry Morgenthau, secretary of the Treasury under President Roosevelt, was to dismantle German industries, break up the nation into smaller bits, and reduce the Germans to being a pastoral people with barely a stick to defend themselves with. Similar ideas did the rounds about Japan.
These schemes came to nothing, and were replaced by the three Ds: Demilitarization, Denazification, Democratization. It was the third D that involved reeducation, not just to change patterns of behavior promoted and enforced by militaristic and dictatorial governments, but to change ways of thinking, the “national character,” by reaching into the minds of the conquered peoples. An instructional film, entitled Our Job in Japan, made by the U.S. War Department, located the problem quite precisely. “Our problem,” the narrator explains, as the image of a Japanese skull appears on the screen, “is in the brain inside the Japanese head.” At the end of the film, he sums up the mission: “We’re here to make it clear to the Japanese brain that we’ve had enough of this bloody barbaric business to last us from here on in.”1
Reforming the natives is a strategy that might be traced back as far as the civilizing efforts of the ancient Romans. Some argue that it came from the Enlightenment conviction that human nature is rational and can be reshaped by the right education. Some recall colonial strategies, such as the French mission civilisatrice. Or the missionary zeal of Christianity. Or the molding through education of immigrants into good American citizens. British accounts have even brought up the faith in character building developed in Victorian boarding schools: the production of sportsmanlike gentlemen with a working knowledge of the classics. Reeducation was also seen as an extension of psychological warfare, the military use of propaganda.
Punch magazine published a poem in 1939 by A. P. Herbert that intimated the need for a reeducation program:
We have no quarrel with the German nation
One would not quarrel with the trustful sheep
But generation after generation
They cough up rulers who disturb our sleep . . .
We have no quarrel with the German nation
In their affairs of course we have no say
But it would seem some major operation
(On head and heart) may be the only way.
Even as the crowds were celebrating victory in Europe on May 8, the following letter appeared in the Times of London, written by a man who was to have a significant influence on education policies in occupied Germany, Robert Birley, headmaster of Charterhouse, the famous private boarding school. “Sir,” he wrote, “it is becoming clear that the re-education of Germany by the allies is not just a pious aspiration, but an unavoidable duty.” The problem with the Germans, as A. P. Herbert also indicated in his poem, and most people believed at the time, was that for more than a century they had been “fatally ready to accept any government which would save them from having to make decisions for themselves.” They had become, in Birley’s view, sheeplike, always following leaders, devoid of individuality, like militarized robots.
Birley then went on to make another, more interesting point, which in the end failed to impress British military occupation authorities, namely that reeducation, to be successful, had to be based on a national tradition. Germany should not be treated as a tabula rasa; Germans had to be persuaded “that they themselves have such a tradition, however completely forgotten now, on which a decent society can be based. There was once a Germany of Goethe, a country which the young Meredith visited because it was a land of liberal thinkers, one with universities which inspired Americans like George Bancroft.”*
Birley’s ideas were certainly popular among Germans who were longing to slough off the brown coat of Hitlerism and cloak themselves in the glories of Goethe, Kant, and Beethoven. As the educational adviser to the British Military Government in Germany in 1945, Birley helped to establish libraries, amply stocked with suitable English and German literature, as well as adult education centers, called Die Brücke (The Bridges), promoting intellectual and cultural exchanges between Britain and Germany. Alas, this promising start ran into opposition from British officials, some of whom had very odd ideas. Only the “extensive mixing of blood with other nationals” would cure the German disease, was one such opinion.2 Another middle-ranking zealot suggested that all ex-Nazis and their families be confined to an island in the North Sea. Birley replied with proper sarcasm that their children, going to school on the mainland, might then infect innocent classmates with their Nazi ideas. Like the Morgenthau Plan, this, too, was quickly scrapped.
A more serious criticism of Birley’s project to revive the best of German culture was that it didn’t do enough the promote the best of British culture. General Brian Robertson, Birley’s immediate superior, and incidentally a former pupil of Charterhouse, ruled that the Military Government needed more protection against criticism of its policies in Germany. In the words of another general, there needed to be more “projection” of “British civilization,” and promotion of British policies.3 Birley resigned and went back to England.
Authorities in the American Zone were initially more inclined to punish than to educate. More effort was spent on purges of teachers suspected of Nazi taints than on remolding the German mind. Some Germans exiled in the U.S. advised the American authorities that reeducation would be futile. The novelist Alfred Döblin said, “Educating the Germans is almost hopeless because the majority of the professional classes are Nazis.” His friend Lion Feuchtwanger, an equally famous German novelist, was convinced that “Three million Nazis must be arrested, killed, or exiled to forced labor.”4 Others talked as though teaching Germans to become better people was as misguided as trying to impart civilization to baboons.
Still, the Potsdam Declaration made the official Allied position clear: “German education shall be so controlled as completely to eliminate Nazi and militarist doctrines and to make possible the successful development of democratic ideas.”5 As far as Japan was concerned, the aims of Postdam sounded less harsh, or at least less controlling: “The Japanese Government shall remove all obstacles to the revival and strengthening of democratic tendencies among the Japanese people. Freedom of speech, of religion, and of thought, as well as respect for the fundamental human rights shall be established.” It is hard to explain this difference in tone, especially in light of what actually happened during the occupation, which was a great deal more radical in Japan than in Germany.
And yet the task of reeducating (a term, by the way, detested by Birley, who preferred the simple “educating”) the Germans was seen as a less complicated affair than doing the same for the Japanese. Germany, after all, was part of Western civilization, largely Christian, the land of Goethe and Kant. The foundations were believed to be sound. What needed to be done was to destroy Nazi ideology and “Prussianism.” Denazification and demilitarization would g
o a long way towards solving the German problem. To this end, German guilt in recent crimes had to be emphasized through the distribution of such films as Nazi Concentration Camps, commissioned by the U.S. Army, or Death Mills, which contained the following lines in the narration:
Here is a typical German barn at Gardelegen. Eleven hundred human beings were herded into it and burned alive. Those who in their anguish broke out were shot as they emerged. What sub-humans did these things?6
These films were not popular in Germany. People refused to see them or dismissed them as propaganda. Günter Grass was seventeen in 1945, a prisoner in an American POW camp after having served briefly in an SS Panzer division. He was instructed, with his fellow prisoners, by an American education officer in a “crisply ironed shirt.” They were shown the photographs of Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, the piles of corpses, the living skeletons. And they didn’t believe any of it: “We kept repeating the same sentences: ‘Germans did that?’ ‘Never.’ ‘Germans would never do such things.’ And among ourselves we said: ‘Propaganda. All this is just propaganda.’”7
Discussion groups, organized by well-meaning American officials, were often just as fruitless. Earnest talks about “how we do [democracy] in the States” did not always attract enough people, since they were held in English, and such topics as “the Nazi state” foundered on defensiveness: we didn’t know, Hitler did many good things, and so on.8 Whenever the education officer in Günter Grass’s camp lectured the Germans on the horrors of racism, the POWs embarrassed him with questions about the treatment of “niggers” in the U.S.
Hungry people also had other things to worry about, as the freezing winter approached. Hans Habe, a Hungarian-American journalist put in charge of establishing newspapers in postwar Germany, remarked: “The idea that the nation should look back, questioning and repenting, was the concept of a conqueror . . . the people only worried about how to fill their stomachs and their stoves . . .”9 Habe, who was Jewish and spent time in a concentration camp, had no reason to feel particularly warmly toward the Germans.
