The America Shogunate
Here in Japan, tourists flock to look at the many castles left from Tokugawa times and earlier, each rising majestically on a hill, with walls and moats and courtyards. Here, the lords of the times — the Daimyo — presided over life and death — protected by their local samurai, a warrior class living in splendor, looking down from the heights on their domains and the villages and towns below where merchants and artisans toiled — and beyond that to the fields where the peasants worked the land.
Life was good for the Daimyo — always — even when famine culled the peasantry, who occasionally had to be taught their place.
Prior to the Tokugawa shogunate, which may be regarded as the most fascist of fascist states, the principal threats to the Daimyo were other daimyo and their clans. In the Tokugawa period, there were no external threats and for the most part domestic peace; with the Shoguns controlling the daimyo with an iron hand, keeping them isolated from another even mandating their families live in Edo as hostages.
But the daimyo paid no taxes, unlike the peasants, who had to surrender about 40% of what they produced.
If castles in this period were nominally fortresses, they were also palaces and symbols of the social order, rising majestically above all else — proclaiming the legitimacy of a social pyramid where the Few lived off the productivity of the Many and Some were better than Others.
The Japanese like to romanticize this period with countless “samurai” movies which find their equivalents in American movies about gunfighters and the Wild West. In fact, there is endless crossover. But historical fact was quite different.
The Japanese castles are seen now by Japanese get their knowledge of their own culture and history from TV and manga, as expressions of values that did not exist in those times, and do not really exist today either. In the West, the Wild West is Hollywood.
Culture is myth. Not history. And that’s a problem.
For example, many still see the US of A as a “shining city on a hill”.
I’ve spoken of the shining city all my political life, but I don’t know if I ever quite communicated what I saw when I said it. But in my mind, it was a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, wind-swept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace; a city with free ports that hummed with commerce and creativity. And if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here. That’s how I saw it, and see it still.
Ronald Reagan 1989.
The irony is that Reagan’s “shining city” could never exist in American society as it has been constituted. It is a myth and like all myths fictive, a lie that “Americans” tell themselves to rationalize the national madness that enables them to identify themselves as the owners of a continent.
It is characteristic of Reagan that while he talking of the “shining city on the hill”, he made no attempt to build it. Instead, he built slums and widened the gap between those at the top and everybody else, institutionalizing greed. Not that every president since then has not done the same.
The USA’s system of militarized police and prisons and a “justice” system which guarantees injustice for the poor, minorities and dissidents ensures that there can be no domestic challenge to those who own the country, the Billionaire class, the Military Industrial Bafuku and the privileged potentates in congress and government.
What is the true face of these United States of Greed? Maybe Jeffry Epstein and Hunter Biden .
Exceptionalism locally is expressed globally. The foundation of any civilization, especially fascist ones, is appropriation of resources.
The American Empire therefore can have no equals, no partners — only vassals — whose peoples live off the scraps of empire and suffer when times are tough so the rulers of the empire can thrive. It neither shares nor cares.
As Edo controlled the Daimyo in Hiroshima and Kyushu and Niigata and elsewhere, allowing them their castles and privileges at the expense of those that served them, so too does Washington allow those who rule in other countries their wealth and privilege — but at the expense of human life.
The Shogunate insisted on dominance rules-based order — and those directives covered every aspect of life. The US does the same, just in a more sophisticated way to handle its larger and more diverse population. The people of Edo Japan accepted these “rules”, who to bow to and how low, what to wear and eat, what to say and what not to say, as commonsense: they never questioned . Dissent was suppressed — absolutely.
How are we different? Isn’t that what “cancel culture” is all about?
Edo Japan benefited from two and half centuries without external threats.
Although it has been a war almost constantly since its inception, the American state has similarly never faced an existential threat on its own territory .WWI and WWII were wars of choice –abroad.
But less than 200 years after its rule began, the Tokugawa Shogunate was faced by the Outside World knocking at is doors and the specter of new and superior military technologies. That lead to reaction — the Meiji Revolution, the short-lived Japanese Empire.
Japan responded as fascist regimes always do — with violence and militarism, defining territory. It took the nominally independent islands close to it. First Hokkaido, then Okinawa. Then Taiwan and Korea. And it moved on to China.
Ultimately, the Japanese Empire over-extended itself. It lost the Pacific War and became an American neo-colonial dependency, serving the “shining city on the hill”.
All fascists are bullies. And what happens to a bully when he gets the shit beaten out of him? He grovels and begs to join that gang that left him with a bloody nose.
The US of A is another schoolyard fascist Bully. It does not wage war on peers or countries that can really fight back. Japan was never an equal. Germany was already locked in conflict with Britain and Russia, which won the war in the end, as it would have done with to without the US.
Now, Russia and China are knocking at the door. They are not existential threats to the US or its people; they really just want to develop in their own ways. But bullies are easily frightened.
Fear causes the US to over-react with imperial violence — militarily and economically — and innocent people suffer.
In the Pacific War, it was the peoples of the Empire that suffered — first in China, the Philippines, Taiwan, and Okinawa — and then finally in Japan. The Emperor and his cronies were safe — and, at the end, their futures and privilege were secure.
In the current crisis, with the US Empire in WWIII with Russia and China, the people of Europe and Japan suffer — but their leaders party on.
For years, the lights of the Castle on the Hill that is the US of A have shone bright and warm for the privileged classes using cheap energy while the homeless huddle for warmth. Legions of gardeners have tended the gardens and music rang in the opulent, usually empty summer homes in Martha’s Vinyard. The music on the streets was angry rap.
Prisoners, serving life sentences for being black, work for pennies an hour.
If Daddy is rich, however, you are too. Where did the money for Hunter Biden’s whores come from? Greed conjoined with lust.
America, after all, is a rape culture.
Not just women or men — but anything living.
As it expanded, the people of the US raped the land and those who had lived there for hundreds of years, taking what they needed to satisfy an unsatisfiable appetite for more, confident that might is right. Once the nation had reached the Pacific, it turned its eyes to exploiting the rest of the world.
With the end of WWII, the US invented economic and financial rape — as anew form of extraterritorial taxation that complements extraterritorial law — a set of instruments — debt slavery, financial controls, and the dollar as a reserve currency. The IMF and the WTO are to modern America as tax collectors were to the Daimyo. Pay or die.
The Tokugawa shogunate could not adapt. Neither could the Meiji Empire. Neither can the US of A. That is the curse of fascism: status and stasis.
The US has lost out technologically to both Russia and China — economically and militarily — not to mention socially and politically.
It is no longer the “exceptional” nation — just another schoolyard bully. Dysfunction child of a dysfunction parent: Britain.
Who will it have to grovel to in future?
