David, I'm not sure that I see your point here. I don't see much difference
between "anti-Americans" and "anti-American", except that it seems to me
that "anti-Americans" is more offensive, since it makes no distinction
between what governments decide and the (very various) peoples of a country.
Just as I would not like to be lumped with John Howard and our immigrant
prisons, I am sure that Deborah is not synonymous with her federal
government. And the myth of British innocence is even more pervasive than
that of US innocence, which is at least hotly contested inside the country.
Read George Monbiot's recent article at
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,1673991,00.html
Two days ago I read John Hershey's extraordinary account (published in the
New Yorker in 1946) of the bomb dropping in Hiroshima. Yes, a terrible
atrocity, which killed about as many people as Bomber Harris did in Dresden,
or the Japanese themselves in Nanking. Of the six survivors Hershey
interviewed, only one expressed anti-Americanism, which passed when she got
back her sewing machine from the ruins of her house; Hershey even expresses
surprise at this. There are still people here who suffered in the Japanese
prisoner of war camps and who bear great bitterness towards the Japanese
(though I've met people who fought the Japanese in New Guinea and feel no
bitterness at all, only a great sadness at the waste of it). No nation
doesn't have blood on its hands. I'm not sure that simplistic
generalisations about guilt illuminate anything. Is it impossible to read
Mishima, for instance, even if he was a Japanese nationalist? Is my son
merely a colonist because he speaks Japanese, visits Japan and is fascinated
by Japanese culture?
Brutal histories don't preclude mutual cultural interests and influences,
which might occur in the shadow of colonisations but which are much more
complex exchanges than those simply explained as expressions of power.
Edward Said writes very well about those complexities. I'm not suggesting
that the past be forgotten, far from it; but it appears in the present in
rather more nuanced ways than you suggest here. The demand for guilt is not
the same as the demand to remember. Guilt, I think, is often an excuse not
to think about something.
Best
A
On 2/1/06 10:37 AM, "David Bircumshaw" <[log in to unmask]>
wrote:
> My post did not say 'anti-american' it was 'anti-americans'. I wrote that
> with a purpose as I am very well aware of the loadedness the phrase
> 'anti-american' can bear. Now, without being nasty, I do suspect you are
> living in a dreamworld, one in which the Japanese aren't pissed off with the
> USA for dropping two atomic bombs on them, remember, yours is the only
> nation to have done that to anyone, I know, all to well, about my own
> nation's guilt, the only thing I can say in self-defence was that neither I
> nor my antecedents took any part in it, but the myth, and the accompanying
> sentimentality, of American (which reads USA) innocence is more than I can
> bear.
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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