Ex – if I may get “funny” about the Hirohito “myth” – it’s all MacArthur’s fault. He kept the Emperor around because the old bastard wanted to be an Emperor himself.

Many Japanese history scholars and grad students and I would agree 100% with your “funny” attribution to MacArthur. Unless my recollection is mistaken, Herbert Bix specifically cited MacArthur’s pivotal role in keeping Hirohito on and rehabilitating him into the “figurehead Emperor” that has been propagated to the larger American public since 1945.

I would say the primary difference between Imperial Japan in the 1930s and the Fascist movement concerns the foundations of the movements. While you are very correct that the essence of the rise of right-wing ideologies and movements in the 1920s and 1930s rise from similar situations – I would point to the Freikorps in Germany being an excellent parallel to the young extremist Japanese officers of the same time period – the situations that the movements involved were reacting to were different. In the case of Italy and Germany the Nazi and Fascist movements brought together the “losers” of the First World War – the young soldiers who fought the war (along with those such as Himmler who did not actually fight in the war but aspired to be soldiers) – who explicitly rejected the previous social and political order as being corrupt and decadent, and therefore proposed to build a “new,” harmonious system of racial comradeship.

The Japanese crisis, however, while sparked by the same sort of economic issues of depression and post-war boom and bust as were faced in Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, was not a rejection of a failed social order. In Japan there was an alliance, as you mentioned, between the oligarchs and the young, energetic, and rebellious officer class. Both sides played against the middle – in this case, quite literally, the middle class who tended more towards what we might call “Western” values, such as they were. The Japanese were latecomers to “Great Power” status and felt cheated, especially as their alliance with Britain did not garner them the sort of colonial gains in Asia that their involvement in the war, in their eyes, were warranted. As an aside, you can find similar feelings of being “cheated” in Italy.

In Germany and Italy the established upper classes (business and military) came late to support the Nazi or Fascist movements, begrudgingly and often at arms-length. Nazism and Fascism had equal contempt for the “old” upper classes, seeking instead to supplant them with ideologically- and racially-selected aristocracies. In Japan the conservative/reactionary wings of the established upper classes worked hand-in-hand with the “rebellious” youth and the only individuals to suffer reprisals were those who sought to stand for moderation.

It isn’t incorrect, however, to view the end result of the oligarchical nature of the Japanese Imperial system in the late 1930s as being functionally similar to Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, especially how their different points of reference became a shared Weltanschauung of imperialist and militant aggressiveness. It’s an interesting example of how different origins can form systems with remarkably similar characteristics. I suppose if I had to boil it down to a pithy sentence, Imperial Japan was an old-style oligarchic-Imperialist state which adopted the trappings of “new” racial and xenophobic ideologies, while Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy saw themselves as “new and revolutionary” racial/xenophobic societies which nonetheless adopted the apparatuses of old-style Imperialist states in order to accomplish their ideological objectives.

The only reason that Emperor Hirohito was able to put his stamp on the decision to surrender is that Suzuki, when faced with a split cabinet, was able to turn around and use the Emperor’s expressed “private opinion” as a way of getting the cabinet to go along. (”I think we should make the Emperor’s private opinion the opinion of this cabinet…”)

tzs,

You are echoing the main American postwar historical narrative which painted Hirohito as a mere figurehead who was uncharacteristically asked to break the impasse among Suzuki’s ministers when the subject of surrender was broached. If one took a glance as to how Japanese Emperors were treated as figureheads with practically no influence, this narrative would understandably make some sense.

Nevertheless, this is the exact narrative more recent Japanese history scholars have been examining with increasing skepticism, especially with increasing scrutinizing of previously unexamined primary sources as Herbert Bix did in his book “Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan”. To scholars like Bix, this postwar narrative was created for politically expedient reasons to both facilitate the American Occupation of Japan and to rehabilitate/rearm Japan as their main East Asian ally. In the process, the concerns of individuals and nations victimized by Japan’s desire for empire along with Hirohito’s and Japan’s own responsibility for the same were largely ignored for the next several decades.

And even with that, there was an attempted coup d’etat by some hotheads in the Ministry of War to keep the broadcast from getting out.

As Michelle Malkin is to my alma mater, Jonah Goldberg is an embarrassing pox upon Goucher College. The “Liberal Fascism” book just underscores that fact. :(

In essence all of these movements coalesced around a particular individual and were radically different – if they survived at all – with the death of said leader.

Tannenberg,

Could one arguably have a Fascist oligarchy where the state fulfills most/all definitions of being Fascist except the leadership is run by a group such as a military junta or a select group of social elites?

I ask as there has been some debate over whether Imperial Japan, especially from 1930′s to 1945 was a Fascist state as the government glorified/inculcated military/martial values throughout society, encouraged xenophobic nationalism in its people, state cooperation with large Japanese corporate conglomerates, etc.

Though I will admit to favoring Herbert Bix’s view that Emperor Hirohito was no mere figurehead and had far more knowledge and influence over Imperial Japanese colonialist and military policies than many American Post-war historical narratives on Japan would have us believe, most of Imperial Japan’s day-to-day affairs was governed by an oligarchy consisting of ranking aristocrats, military officers, and civil servants.

What are your thoughts?

Bin Laden, at any rate, is not a state actor but a non-state actor and a religious nutcase.

this is also true. i remember when the islamo-fascist debate was happening, this was joshua micah marshall’s central point; ie that fascism was a distinctly secular movement and thus al-quaeda didn’t qualify.

the problem is that progressives have labeled various religious movements, from “christian fascism” to the KKK, to Zionism, and even Hindu nationalism (hindutva) as fascist; but suddenly when radical islam, despite possessing arguably the central tenet of fascism, murderous suppression of all dissent, is labeled fascist we have a problem.

now men like goldberg and niewert are moving the goalpost in even further.

fascism actually *is*, i.e., a movement of the right rather than the left

this is true, zuzu, of the colloquial use of fascism, as i stated b/f, as “right-wing authoritarianism” or as mussolini himself defined “”right wing collectivism.”

jonah’s argument is silly, but i think this is the least problematic of it as he’s proabably using a derivation of susan sontag’s definition of communism as “fascism with a human face.” In this paradigm, extreme right and left are not opposites on a line, but rather points on a circle that meet.

fascism is the government and corporations working hand-in-hand

good point. But if this is central to your definition of fascism, or even pseudo-fascism, then you’ve excluded bush, and certainly the conservative movement in general, from the label. fascist economics is characterized by an extreme government regimentation of industry, nationalization of certain industries (including control over the education of children and the confiscation and strict regulation of firearms) and an ideological oppostion to laissez-faire capitalism, as well as marxist socialism.

fascist economics favored protectionism and subsides to fight of foreign competition. Hitler advocated nationaliztion, proifit sharing, price and wage controls and even a social security like retirement fund.

you’re continuing to make my argument for me.