Jean Sénat Fleury, 6/30/22
The literary inventory concerning Hirohito is not very voluminous, unlike that on Adolf Hitler, where the research done on the Führer does not fail to report the heinous crimes of the Nazis against a well-defined category of men, the Jews. Here, it is not a question of conducting any debate on the two main figures of the Second World War. They were two monsters. The only difference is that there are a lot of writings on Hitler, while very few books have been published on Hirohito. History has always presented Hitler as a monster, a fierce dictator, responsible for the deaths of millions of soldiers and civilians during the Second World War.
On the other hand, we have long been forced to believe in a false speech, namely, that Hirohito has no responsibility for the war crimes committed by the Japanese imperial forces between 1937 and 1945 in the Pacific. Having his power totally limited by ministers and the military, it is therefore normal that the emperor be absolved of the war crimes of the Japanese Imperial Army and the Japanese Imperial Navy during the Shōwa era. The Meiji Constitution of February 11, 1889, certainly gives him the authority to choose the prime minister and the members of the High Staff of the Army. However, the emperor in Japan has symbolic power. Before the new constitution of 1946, he was a living god, and therefore he should not interfere in political matters.
Our opinion on the matter is very different. In our eyes, Hitler was a sadistic criminal, one of the most bloodthirsty in human history. Hirohito, for his part, was a cunning and perverse monarch. Hidden in the shadows, he directed the actions of Japanese troops who occupied, during the Second World War, almost all of the territories in the Pacific and in the Southeast Asia.
Never having faced each other in their existence, the two men ― Hitler and Hirohito ― have gone down in history as two evil political partners. German ideology and Japanese ideology are somewhat different, but the principles are the same: conquer territories in order to have raw materials while accentuating if necessary, a territorial enlargement. German and Japanese expansionist desires are at the origin of the alliance between the two countries. The ambition to dominate Europe led Hitler to invade the majority of European countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland, Belgium, Greece, Netherlands, Yugoslavia, Denmark, France, Norway, Russia) in the name of the superiority of the German race over other peoples.
Hitler realized his plans to conquer Europe by annexing Austria in March 1938: it is the Anschluss. After a provocation operation known as the Gleiwitz incident, German troops invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. On September 3, 1939, France and the United Kingdom declared war on Germany under a treaty of February 1921, which bound them to Poland. Thus, the Second World War broke out in Europe. On May 10, 1940, seven months after the declaration of war of France and England to Germany, Hitler broke the Western front. He launched his armies on the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. The war had really begun.
On June 22, 1941, Nazi troops entered Russia without any declaration of war. For their part, dissatisfied with the treatment accorded to the Japanese empire by the Western powers during the
Treaty of Versailles and the naval treaties of Washington and London, Japanese politicians developed an ideology based on the superiority of the Japanese race and its rights to dominate Asia.
In the early 1930s, in order to spread Japan’s hegemony in the Pacific and Southeast Asia and defeat the United States’ agenda looking to destabilize the monarchy he had inherited, Hirohito launched his country into war. In 1931, Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria. Japan, sidelined by Western democracies for having attacked Manchuria in 1931, followed by the rest of China in 1937, signed on September 27, 1940, the tripartite pact with Germany and Italy. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked the American base at Pearl Harbor. The next day, December 8, the United States declared war on Japan. On December 11, Hitler, under a treaty with Japan, declared war on the United States. The Second World War broke out in Asia. Classified as the two main figures that broke out the Second World War, alongside Mussolini, Hitler and Hirohito remain in the eyes of several experts and historians as war criminals.
As many viewed Hitler and Hirohito as two monsters eighty years ago, today many view Putin as another war criminal. The three men had developed the same intent. Hitler had an overriding ambition for territorial expansion, which was largely driven by his desire to occupy Europe. In his diabolic mind, he launched the war in Europe to allow Germany to become economically strong and military secure. To do so, he extorted the capital from the Jews after killing several millions of them in the concentration camps. He invaded Poland, France, Belgium, and many other territories during WWII.
Six years after the invasion of Manchuria, in 1937, with Hirohito’s endorsement, the Second Sino-Japanese War was launched. Japanese troops invaded China on July 7, 1937, and perpetrated atrocities on the people of Nanking. The Second Sino-Japanese War became the largest Asian war in the twentieth century. Having mobilized several millions of troops from different nations, and killed more than 25 million people, the Pacific War remained one of the deadliest armed conflicts in the history. The war has been called the “Asian holocaust.”
On February 24, 2022, Putin decided to invade Ukraine to stop the West for taking control military of that territory via NATO. Attacks by Russian forces were reported in major cities across Ukraine, including Berdyansk, Chernihiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Sumy, and the capital Kyiv. The Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) verified several thousands deaths of civilians and soldiers. The war resulted in a humanitarian crisis, as thousands of Ukrainians fled to the west of their country and abroad.
As Hitler and Hirohito, Putin has an overriding ambition for territorial expansion. He wants to secure Russia by building a Russian empire. His long term goal is to disrupt American politics in Europe. Then, he can bring down United States’ influence as a world power. Would he be successful in his plan? I do not know for sure. However, as Mahatma Gandhi, I can say: “there have been tyrants and murderers and for a time they seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall – think of it, always. – Mahatma Gandhi