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Greetings!
The Asia-Pacific Journal
now has Non-Profit Organization status. Your contribution to the Journal is tax
deductible. Our thanks to those who have taken notice of this new
opportunity.
More
than 11,000 people now subscribe to APJ, either through our Newsletter or
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Twitter or Facebook, whose numbers are growing
steadily. Please consider joining them by clicking at the appropriate link on
our home page.
The
Journal is and will continue to be provided free to readers. But if you value
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that you will subscribe at the rate of $25 or $50 ($10 for students and
residents of low income countries). You can contribute via Paypal or credit card
at our home page on the upper left
side.
Check
out the most widely read articles at APJ . . . in the last month, last year,
last five years and all time: at Top Ten Articles on our
home page.
Asia
Pacific Journal NEW Free Downloadable Course Readers!!!
The
Asia Pacific Journal: Japan Focus announces the release of our second
set of volume-length e-book compilations of essays on selected topics with
explanatory introductions by scholars. The volume editors have chosen articles
from the archive that lend themselves particularly well to classroom use and
work well as a set.All volumes have been peer-reviewed, in addition
to the initial review process before each article was originally posted, and we
have permission from all verified copyright holders.
New
Course Readers:
**
The Japanese Empire:
Colonial Lives and Postcolonial Struggle edited by Kirsten
Ziomek
**
Japan's "Abandoned People" in the Wake
of Fukushima edited by Brian Earl
**
Public Opinion on Nuclear Power in
Japan after the Fukushima Disaster edited by Brian Earl
**
The Politics of Memory in Japan and
East Asia edited by Sven Saaler & Justin Aukema
They
join the earlier publications:
- War and Visual Culture edited by
Hong Kal and Jooyeon Rhee.
- Environmental History edited by
Eiko Maruko Siniawer.
- War in Japanese Popular Culture
edited by Matthew Penney.
- Women and Japan's Political Economy
edited by Valerie Barske.
The
volumes are downloadable from the Asia-Pacific Journal website as searchable PDFs.
From the home page, please click on the button marked Course Readers at the top
and center of the page, or go directly to the course reader
page. Interested viewers may download a copy of any reader by clicking on
the appropriate link at the course readers home page and entering their email
address. In addition, viewers may directly download the table of contents of
each course reader for a preview of the volume.
If
you are interested in creating a volume yourself, wish to participate as a
reviewer and editor, have suggestions for new topics, or want to discuss another
aspect of this project, please contact Laura Hein at
l-hein@northwestern.edu.
***
All
recent articles are now available on Kindle, as are several recent articles. If
you experience any difficulty in accessing them, please let us know at
info.japanfocus@gmail.com.
Our
home page has a category Featured Articles. This
will take you to the most widely read articles of recent times and over our
decade of publication. Check it out to discover some of the most important work
that has appeared in the journal..
Our home page has a number of important features. There is a powerful
search engine that permits search by author, title, and keyword, found in top
left of the home page. For most purposes, author's surname or a keyword entered
in Title is most useful. Another is a regularly updated guide to the more than
100 articles we have published on the 3.11 earthquake, tsunami and nuclear power
meltdown which is transforming Japanese politics and society, and is reshaping
issues of nuclear power and energy policy in that nation and globally. In
addition, we have added a guide to some of the most important, and liveliest,
online and print sources on 3.11 including blogs and websites.
We
invite authors, publishers and directors to bring their books, films and events
on East Asia and the Pacific to the attention of our readers. See the home page
for information about presenting relevant books and films at our site and for
examples of authors, publishers and filmmakers who are presenting their work at
the Journal.
Contact
Japan Focus by email at info@japanfocus.org
To
access our full archive with more than 2,000 articles, and to view the most
widely read articles through their titles or via our index, go here.
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Subscription information
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The
Asia-Pacific Journal is freely available to all. We invite those who wish to
support our work by allowing us to make technical upgrades, defray
technical, mailing and maintenance fees, and to enable us to expand our output
since the 3.11 earthquake and tsunami. Recommended support level: $25 ($10 for
students and residents of developing countries); $40 for institutions including
libraries, research centers, government offices. If you experience difficulty in
subscribing, write to us with the error message at
info@japanfocus.org
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Peter Dale Scott, The Pseudo-War on Terror: How
the US Has Protected Some of Its Enemies
Since
9/11, above all, constitutional American government has been overshadowed by a
series of emergency measures to fight terrorism. The latter have mushroomed in
size and budget, while traditional government has been shrunk. As a result we
have today what the journalist Dana Priest has called
two
governments: the one its citizens were familiar with, operated more or less in
the open: the other a parallel top secret government whose parts had mushroomed
in less than a decade into a gigantic, sprawling universe of its own, visible to
only a carefully vetted cadre - and its entirety...visible only to God.
More and more, it is becoming common to say that America, like Turkey
before it, now has what Marc Ambinder and John Tirman have called a deep state
behind the public one. And this parallel government is guided in surveillance
matters by its own Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, known as the FISA
court, which according to the New York Times "has quietly become almost a
parallel Supreme Court." Thanks largely to Edward Snowden, it is now clear that
the FISA Court has permitted this deep state to expand surveillance beyond the
tiny number of known and suspected Islamic terrorists, to any incipient protest
movement that might challenge the policies of the American war
machine.
It is time to consider the extent to which American secret agencies have
developed a symbiotic relationship with the forces they are supposed to be
fighting - and have even on occasion intervened to let al-Qaeda terrorists
proceed with their plots. For indeed it is certain that on various occasions
U.S. agencies have intervened, letting al-Qaeda terrorists proceed with their
plots. This alarming statement will be dismissed by some as "conspiracy theory."
Yet I will show that this claim does not arise from theory, but from facts,
about incidents that are true even though they have been systematically
suppressed or under-reported in the American mainstream media.
Peter
Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University
of California, Berkeley, is the author of Drugs Oil and War, The Road to 9/11,
and The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. His most recent
book is American War Machine: Deep Politics, the CIA Global Drug Connection and
the Road to Afghanistan. His website, which contains a wealth of his writings,
is here.
Recommended citation: Peter Dale Scott, "The
Pseudo-War on Terror: How The US Has Protected Some of Its Enemies," The
Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 40, No. 2, October 7, 2013.
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D.H. Garrett, A View from the
Ninth Floor
Once
upon a time I was a minor diplomat. My office was in the political section of
the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo. To get to my office, depending on who was protesting
us, sometimes having to scurry around an unsmiling phalanx or two of tall
Japanese policemen with long wooden batons, I would show my badge to the
Japanese guards at the outer gate, then cross the courtyard and go up the stone
stairs and through the front outer glass doors of the stark wall of concrete and
glass that is our embassy. Then I would show my badge and my face to the marine
guard behind the bulletproof glass, at which point the door would buzz open and
I would be able to go in through the glass inner doors into the Embassy's
sanctum itself. Already as I write this I am fearful I am giving away secrets,
but if you must know, after entering the elevators are to the left. Just before
getting to the elevators are the official portraits of the President, the Vice
President and the Secretary of State. When it was the pictures of Bush, Cheney
and Rice with their crazed grins, I used to cringe internally and pray silently
for protection from their vampirism. When the pictures changed to Obama, Biden,
and Clinton, at first I felt a great moral relief, until that is it became clear
that the previous policies were to continue essentially unabated or in some
regards, even worsen.
Once you pass the pictures of the "leaders of the
free world" you can enter the bank of elevators and climb to the 9th floor. If
each floor were a circle of hell from Dante's Inferno, then you would start at
the circle of Limbo, and rise past Lust, Gluttony, Greed, Anger, Heresy,
Violence, and Fraud, and finally arrive at the 9th Circle of Hell: Treachery. On
the other hand, if this were Dante's Purgatorio, the 9th level would be the
Earthly Paradise. I leave it to the reader to decide which is more appropriate.
My office was the 2nd door to the left, the smallest office in the
section. Half of it was actually taken over by one of the structural columns of
the building. In sharing my small office with that very large pillar I liked to
think that tasked as I was with the issues of Human Rights, Trafficking in
Persons, and International Organizations that I, too, was an important pillar of
the Embassy. Sometimes, I would put my arm around the pillar and look out the
half of the window that it wasn't covering and say, "Pillar, the U.S. is a
mighty country, what can we do today that will be of help to someone who is
suffering?" The fact of the matter though, was that it was the preservation of
the security alliance that trumped everything else. Half of the political
section was devoted to supporting, consoling, explaining, expanding, and putting
out the occasional fire caused by the security arrangement.
Recommended
Citation: D.H. Garrett, "A View from the Ninth Floor," The Asia-Pacific Journal,
Vol. 11, Issue 40, No. 2, October 7, 2013.
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Susan Brewer, Selling
Empire: American Propaganda and War in the Philippines
At the turn of the twentieth century, Americans and
Filipinos fought bitterly for control of the Philippine Islands. The United
States viewed the Pacific islands as a stepping-stone to the markets and natural
resources of Asia. The Philippines, which had belonged to Spain for three
hundred years, wanted independence, not another imperial ruler. For the
Americans, the acquisition of a colony thousands of miles from its shores
required a break with their anti-imperial traditions. To justify such a break,
the administration of William McKinley proclaimed that its policies benefited
both Americans and Filipinos by advancing freedom, Christian benevolence, and
prosperity. Most of the Congress, the press, and the public rallied to the flag,
embracing the war as a patriotic adventure and civilizing mission. Dissent,
however, flourished among a minority called anti-imperialists. Setting
precedents for all wartime presidents who would follow, McKinley enhanced the
power of the chief executive to build a public consensus in support of an
expansionist foreign policy.
This article explores McKinley's use of wartime
propaganda extolling national progress and unity to aid his successful
navigation of the transition of the United States to great power status.
Susan A.
Brewer is a professor of history at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point.
She is the author of Why America Fights: Patriotism and War Propaganda from the
Philippines to Iraq and To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United
States during World War II.
Recommended
citation: Susan Brewer, "Selling Empire: American Propaganda and War in the
Philippines," The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 40, No. 1, October 7,
2013.
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