Another of NATO’s bright ideas for world peace.

At Bloomberg a curious article has been published: The West is getting in too deep in Ukraine. PANKAJ MISHRA asks the obvious question. Who has thought through what it means to rearm Germany and Japan?

There are too many signs that the search for allies in what is effectively now the West’s war against Russia is affecting political and moral judgment. Thus, India is routinely presented in the West as a counterweight to Chinese and Russian autocrats even as its Hindu supremacist government intensifies its assault on democracy and the country ramps up its purchases of Russian oil. A bizarre forgetfulness about two world wars prevails as, to wide cheers in the West, Germany rearms and dispatches military hardware to its old killing fields.

Among the simple historical lessons being neglected is that governments everywhere are prone to grow more reckless as military escalation begins to seem the only route to peace.

Continue reading Re-arming Germany and Japan at uncoy.

Japanese Deputy Prime Minister Taro Aso has claimed that any war between China and Taiwan would be an attack on Japan.

“If a major incident happened [in Taiwan], it would not be strange at all if it touches on a situation threatening survival,” Aso said during a speech in Tokyo. “If that is the case, Japan and the U.S. must defend Taiwan together.”

This strange language stems from the prohibition against Japan taking up arms unless its national survival is at stake. Aso’s statements are a Sophistic attempt to get around Japan’s well-earned ban on Japanese extra-territorial military activity. No surprise, Rand corportation is coaching the Japanese through the intellectual cartwheels involved:

“For example, since the United States is responsible for defending Japan under Article 5 of the security treaty, if the United States is attacked, this could affect Japan’s survival and thus can be defined as such,” Hornung wrote.

Continue reading Drawing up battle lines for war: Japan wades into the Taiwan-China conflict at uncoy.

Banality of travel, every subway car
we’ve all seen in photos: Hong Kong, New York,
Moscow, Tokyo, London or Toronto;
just a visual fragment is the detritus
of modern consciousness, your subway cars
mean nothing more to me, less, than my own

How can I see inside Japanese existence or
the mysteries of the Russian soul, or feel Filipino sense of complacent helplessness
and anger (their entire stock of able, active men, and those men’s women and children,
wiped out by E. Otis and J. Smith in just a few years).

I want no prisoners. I wish you to kill and burn, the more you kill and burn the better it will please me. I want all persons killed who are capable of bearing arms in actual hostilities against the United States,

Resonance

Images will no longer do.

Continue reading Transit Images at uncoy.