one beneficial side effect of my new 2-3 hours commute each way is that i have a lot of time to read. at times i am an active reader. but i also find that my arabic studies occupy the same block of time as reading. so as my arabic class gets more intense, requiring more out-of-class time, it cuts into my reading time. as the semester edges ever closer to my final exam next week, my reading has slowed to a crawl and its been creeping along for about a month now.
another factor in my reading speed is what i'm reading. right now, i'm reading embracing defeat, by john w. dower. it won the pulitzer prize. while it is quite well-written, it also happens to be the kind of book that most slows me down (i.e. academic-type history books). but that doesn't mean i'm not enjoying it. on the contrary, i really love it.
the book is about america's attempts at nation building in japan at the end of world war two. what's interesting about the period is that while it is almost universally cited as a "good" nation-building experience, the details of what happened are not really common knowledge. i've been meaning to read this book since i read a review of it in 1999, but the book seemed to gain in relevance with the fall of the taliban in afghanistan and then the current invasion and occupation of iraq. as i've been working my way through over the past few weeks, my reading has been interspersed with news reports of announcements of the occupational authorities in iraq. earlier in the book, i was constantly seeing parallels and non-parallels that seemed to be instructive about what is going wrong in iraq right now.
but now i've changed my mind. i think many of us take george santayana's famous quote, "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," a bit too literally. while history does provide guidance in making our decisions in the present, history does not literally repeat itself. (sorry nietzsche). historical events are just too complicated. sure, we can analogize american efforts to democratize iraq with its prior efforts to democratize japan, but the devil's in the details. and when you read good accounts of history, there are a whole lot of details. which of those details are relevant to guide us in iraq today and which ones are just random circumstances? which threads can be pulled out before the whole thing unravels? after a while, there's no way of knowing the difference.
so my initial onslaught of a-ha! moments as i read "embracing defeat" have gradually given way to a long list of distinctions. by now i've reached a point of seeing so many distinctions, the similarities that i do notice appear to be more a matter of coincidence. what happened in japan between 1945 and the 1950s seems less an less relevant either as a model to follow in iraq or as a indictment of what the u.s. is doing wrong there. it simply was a different time and place, with its own peculiarities and circumstances.
nevertheless, quotes still jump out at me now and then because they resonate with more current events. i guess, in a way, that shows that there are some things to be learned from japan that can be applied to iraq--i just can't always draw concrete lessons from them. so, at the risk of undermining basically everything i wrote above, here's one that jumped out at me on the train as i cruised through new jersey a few hours ago:
"People of all nations of the world absolutely should not abandon the right to initiate wars of self-defense."
-tojo hideki (japanese prime minister during world war two), in his "final message" just before being executed as a war criminal
i'm not drawing any analogy here. but it at least gives us something to think about.
