Correction. The unprovoked attack on Peal Harbor was carried out to establish Japanese dominence over Asia.

The South, however, waged a civil war in defense of their way of life as opposed to an act of imperialist aggression.

I think you misunderstood why I wrote that “the Japanese were fighting because America was trying to choke their country off.”

I was NOT stating my opinion but representing the opinion of the right-wing ideologues in Japan. America’s embargo and other acts were/are used as a justification for Japan’s war of aggression, especially by those who don’t like admitting Japan’s wrongs, just as states’ rights were/are used as a justification for secession and war by the South, by people who don’t like admitting that defense of slavery was a central feature of the antebellum South and the central reason for the war.

Defense of states’ rights, like Japan’s defense agains the embargo, were only proximal causes and issues glossing over the bigger issues of the South’s insistence on adhering to the cruel institution of slavery and Japan’s cruel invasion of the Asian mainland.

Slavery was indeed the central issue, mush as imperialism was the central issue for Japan.

With that I agree. I think I even stated as much somewhere up above.

Indeed, there has been historical whitewashing in both cases, human nature being what it is. However, slavery has not been omitted from American history books and the situation is very different.

Japan’s aggressions have NOT been ommitted from Japan’s textbooks. Including these in detail is part of the Good Neighbors policy of Japanese education (the result, in part, of Korea and others complaining about white-washed textbooks in the past).

The uproar over the textbooks since 2001 has been because right-wing publishing agencies are trying to REMOVE some of these or water them down. The uproar over various politicians comes from Japanese, too, because they KNOW that “Japan never invaded Korea” is a falsehood.

I also agree with Sonagi’s point: being a multicultural society, we must coexist with those whom we’ve wronged. In the case of our historical treatment of slavery, the civil rights movement was ultimately successful in redefining political correctnesss- which made slavery-sympathetic views taboo. I feel that our discussion is mostly framed around America’s “guilt,” without consideration of the blood and tears that many people shed for us to have the consciousness about slavery and racial inequality that we do today.

Why does any group of people do anything? What is the motive? I tell you, it is money. Why did the South want to keep slaves? Money.

Why did the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor? Money. To get more.

All these -isms(including Communism) are there for justification, but the real cause is “the love of money”. The root of all evil, as the Bible says.

People want to have more(of everything), so they kill. “Everything she sees is everything she wants”(wham!).

Correction. The unprovoked attack on Peal Harbor was carried out to establish Japanese dominence over Asia.

The South, however, waged a civil war in defense of their way of life as opposed to an act of imperialist aggression.

Slavery was indeed the central issue, mush as imperialism was the central issue for Japan. Indeed, there has been historical whitewashing in both cases, human nature being what it is. However, slavery has not been omitted from American history books and the situation is very different.

And this “radical evolution of consciousness that American achieved in just a few decades” was preceded by eight decades of serious denial, then.

Japan (I’m avoiding bringing Korea into what would then be a long, long, long post because this was only about Japan and the U.S. originally) cannot be described in black-and-white terms as an atrocity-denying nation, and at the same time the U.S. at this point after slavery could not be described as whitewash-free.

It’s universal human nature to want to sweep embarrassing details of one’s past under the carpet. “Centuries of denial” does not just belong to Japan and its nearby neighbors.

This evidemces the huge chasm between progressive American thinking and tradition-bound Asian thinking.

The radical evolution of consciousness that America achieved in just a few decades stands in stark contrast to centuries of denial in Japan, China and Korea.

Again, Mark, why should YOU be compensated for what happened to your ancestors hundreds of years ago? That’s something different Mark, if YOU were the one who had to sleep with 30 Mongolian soldiers per day in the front lines. Then yes, you should be entitled to your compensation.

And yes, you should tell that to native Americans and African Americans.

True, but the parts of the South under Union control kept slaves after the Emancipation Procolmation, which freed only those slaves in rebellious lands. Mrs. Ulysses S. Grant, for one, owned slaves during the war.

From A Jeffersonian View of the Civil War:

The Emancipation Proclamation was a “war measure,” as Lincoln put it. Foreign correspondents covering the war recognized it as a brilliant propaganda coup. Emancipation would take place only in rebel states not under Union control, their state sovereignty in the matter of slavery arguably forfeited as a result of their having seceded from the Union. The president could not abolish slavery; if not done at the state level, abolition would require a constitutional amendment. Slaveholders and their slaves in Missouri, Kentucky, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee, and parts of Virginia and Louisiana occupied by Union troops were exempt from the edict. Slaves in the Confederacy would be “forever free” on January 1, 1863 ? one hundred days after the Proclamation was issued ? but only if a state remained in “rebellion” after that date. Rebel states that rejoined the Union and sent elected representatives to Congress before January 1, 1863 could keep their slaves. Such states would no longer be considered in rebellion and so their sovereignty regarding the peculiar institution would be restored. As the London Spectator put it, in its October 11, 1862 issue: “The principle [of the Proclamation] is not that a human being cannot justly own another, but that he cannot own him unless he is loyal to the United States.”

Let me recommend the best book I’ve read on the War Between the States, and the second best book on the US (after Toqueville): Orestes A. Brownson, The American Republic, written in 1865 by a pro-Union, anti-Slavery, anti-Abolitionist, ex-Transcendentalist, Catholic convert journalist and philosopher

however, i don’t see the comparison of japan’s comfort women and the south’s slaves. the original issue was that lots of slaves in the us were raped just like lots of comfort women (or more appropriately, all comfort women.) but how does that exclude the north just because they willingly stopped raping slaves by giving up slavery?
and by the way, mint julips taste great but that’s usually for women. southern men generally drink straight bourbon.