August 15, 2007
Two Annniversaries Posted by Fredric Smoler at 12:45 PM EST Yesterday marked two vastly important anniversaries, that of V-J Day, the surrender of Japan, which got a single New York Times story in its honor, and the sixtieth anniversary of the partition of the Indian subcontinent upon British withdrawal, the date Pakistan celebrates its independence (India is celebrating its independence today). I read a couple of newspaper pieces on the famous kiss in Times Square, one in the Times pondering the recreation of the event on its sixty-second anniversary by some 75 couples, another today in the same paper perhaps a little snarkily asserting the improbability of anyone ever celebrating the end of the Iraq War with a memorable kiss. That seemed a backhanded tribute to V-J Day; at least it once meant something great and impressive to Americans, whereas Iraq, the comparison insists, never will. (Perhaps significantly, the piece does not bother to speculate on how Iraqis may remember the end of their war.) The transformation of a once-terrifying Japan into a peaceful and immensely rich democracy, largely achieved by American arms, is yesterday’s news, hence almost no news, and as it happens, the newer schoolbooks often teach that we didn’t even do it. Some of them insist it was the Soviet declaration of war that made Japan surrender (much-disputed by the specialists, and for my money very effectively disputed, but the specialists rarely write the schoolbooks). Americans, often depicted as deep-dyed with brutal and dishonest military triumphalism, seem to have this year missed V-J Day when glorying in our arms. What about consciousness of the creation of India and Pakistan? There were a couple of pieces in today’s Times, one of them very interesting, noting that India has begun teaching some of its own political controversies in its schools and suggesting that this is a sign of India’s new wealth, confidence, and political maturity. India, in my boyhood celebrated as the world’s largest democracy and nowadays one of the world’s most striking contemporary successes, ought to be big news. If you are the sort of person who reads op-eds on foreign policy, you may be newly accustomed to hearing that non-Western societies do not value democracy when it can possibly be suspected of having been imposed on them by another culture, that the occupier only leaves when terrorism, the poor man’s only possible weapon, forces him out, that neoliberal nostrums do not make anyone rich, etc. The history of India ought to complicate this sort of conventional wisdom a little more than it does. Perhaps the history of Pakistan ought to complicate the conventional wisdom, too. Anyone whose knowledge of the world is largely based on reading op-eds and editorials can be forgiven believing Israel to be the only state in the world in which religious affiliation is intimately connected to ideas of full and idealized citizenship (and for that matter, privileged access to citizenship, enshrined in something not wholly unlike Israel’s law of return, also exists in Ireland, Greece, Hungary, Germany, Lithuania, Serbia, Japan, India, Armenia, Finland, Bulgaria, Spain, etc., another fact under-reported in op-eds). As a threat to world peace, Israel is probably oversold and Pakistan—which having started a fair number of wars seemed only five years ago on the verge of a nuclear war, and which seems to have exported the designs for nuclear weapons to North Korea, and which is widely accused of helping the Taliban kill Afghans, Americans, and various other people—remarkably undersold. Anniversaries are not only interesting when they make us remember some history; they are also interesting when they signally fail to do anything of the kind.
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