By Iain Marlow
Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe kicked off March with a bomb: “The fact is, there is no evidence to prove there was coercion.”With that, Abe lied and politically slandered roughly 200,000 “comfort women” – women who were forcibly housed in de facto brothels by the Japanese army that had conquered much of Asia in the Second World War.
Part of Abe’s far-right wing nationalist agenda includes downplaying Japan’s past colonial aggression in the region. Abe said, essentially, that thousands of women willingly consented to rape. Condemnation and demands for an apology were swift and global – including Canadian MPs.
Let’s hope rattling samurai swords stay sheathed and that retaliations remain rhetorical.
East Asia is a fragile place these days: now-nuclear North Korea is in the midst of a tenuous disarmament and an increasingly powerful and assertive China recently announced a military budget increase of almost 18 per cent.
But Abe’s comments are useful for highlighting what should be blatantly apparent: far-right wing thinking is ill-suited to lead modern day liberal democracies. It is time for us to start judging the quality of our leaders by the quality of their comments.
What Abe said was politically cretinous and morally outrageous. Comments like this throw into justifiable question the judgment and character of the person who uttered it.
This brings us to Canada and to Prime Minister Stephen Harper, a man who twists his absurd right wing ideas into audience-pleasing shapes in the forge of his media relations team.
When Harper says what he actually feels on issues important to Canadians, such as climate change, the Iraq War, and the country’s relationship to the U.S., the results are distastefully medieval and unbecoming of a leader.
Harper wrote in 2002, in the not-as-infamous-as-it-should-be letter to supporters of the now-defunct Canadian Alliance party that: “Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations.”
He knew which side of the country buttered his bread, which shows political acumen. This man also equated environmentalism with, essentially, Stalinism, which shows idiocy.
On the conflict in Iraq, pro-war Harper shows he is not just out of touch with Canadians, but with global opinion:
“On the justification for the war, it wasn’t related to finding any particular weapon of mass destruction,” he said in an August 2003 interview with Maclean’s.
Harper said he predicted the “post-war situation” – a rather-hazy catch-all for an unending bloodbath – would be worse than the actual war, but this was necessary because, “clearly [the Iraqi government] had the intention of constructing weapons systems.”
That rationale opens up a frighteningly bizarre can of worms. Which country doesn’t have a weapons system?
The United States, for one, is constructing a missile defense system – and the last time I checked, Harper was quite open to Canada’s participation.
Harper’s vehicle of rhetoric seems still to be running on the same now-discredited fuel as the American neo-conservative hawks.
The Japanese left is nervous as Abe steers their islands dangerously rightward.
Canadians should worry, too. Canada needs to be more aggressive on the world stage, obviously. But let’s refuse to rebuild our nation in the penalty box of world opinion, in the likeness of George W. Bush.
This is what Harper wants. We should reject this path – one articulated in 1997, when Harper spoke to a group of conservative American lobbyists – as unfit for our country.
He said it himself: “[Y]our country, and particularly your conservative movement, is a light and an inspiration to people in [Canada] and across the world.”