History has seen plenty of depotic regimes and movements. In the twentieth century, two of the worst almost brought the world to its knees with its eugenics and expansionist movements. Japan, in the 1930's and Germany in the late 1930's and the early 1940's tried to install regimes based on racial purity and at the same time set up governments that would control the societies to be established. Expecting their programs to garner new adherents and birth rates commensurate with programs encouraging fertility, the Japanese and German regimes went on land grabs with various excuses, from protecting indigenous peoples with ties to the homeland to spurious provocations that were later proven to have been instigated by the allegedly aggrieved parties. World War II turned out to be the worst conflagration the planet has ever known.
The trouble is that most historians focus on the eugenics and the expansionist movements with economical underpinnings. To be sure, there were those factors involved in each case. Both Japan and Germany had those stated intentions as their reasons for their belligerent actions. Many citizens of the two countries may also have supported those goals. The national policies may even have reflected those goals, officially. But there was something far more nefarious behind those stated goals.
Little attention has been paid to the people who formed the Japanese and German governments of the era. Both governments were run by thugs who pushed aside the career politicians and military men or cowed them into acquiescence with their brutal tactics.
In 1932, naval recruits succeeded in murdering the Japanese Primer Minister, Inukai Tsuyoshi, due to his support for the London Naval Treaty, which severely restricted the tonnage and types of ships Japan could build. Supported by the ultra-national League of Blood and cadets from the Japanese Army, the eleven murders received light sentences after a letter-writing campaign convinced the Emperor to reduce the sentences. This milquetoast response led to another uprising four years later which had more severe consequences for the upstarts, but the two events caused a general cowering within Japanese society that led to a criminal element seizing control of the Army and major diplomatic posts. During this period, Japanese military units ran riot in China, during which the infamous Rape of Nanking occurred. During the Rape of Nanking, two Japanese officers had a beheading contest in which the two men sought to best the other in beheading the most Chinese captives in an hour. Despite protests from some modern-day Japanese as to the authenticity of the crime, Japanese newspapers covered the travesty for its readers back home:
The Nanking incident also saw thousands of women raped and other live Chinese used for bayonet practice:
To this day there are Japanese who deny this ever happened, but that's another story altogether.
The Germans, meanwhile, were more organized than their Japanese cohorts. Hitler was a singularly persuasive entity and rallied such luminaries as the morphine addict Hermann Goering, the chicken farmer Heinrich Himmler and the anti-Semite Josef Goebbels to his standard, where they worked together to overthrow the mainstream German government from within, culminating in Hitler's ascension to Chancellor in 1933. From that point forward Germany began its descent into the nine rings of Dante's Inferno. Anti-Semitism, theft, murder, war and sundry other crimes against humanity, the most heinous of which was the Holocaust, left an indelible mark on history (it should be mentioned that the Japanese also had area 751, whereat it ran experiments on live humans that defy credulity).
Now, more than seventy-five years later, another movement, this time cloaked in religion, is foisting itself on the world. Much like pre-war Europe, many countries are standing on the sidelines and watching. ISIS promises to come to the United States and raise its flag over the White House. That's a dubious boast at best. But what ISIS is doing to fellow Muslims and other Iraqis is similar to the ravages brought down on peoples by the Japanese and Germans. And like those groups, ISIS is populated by a criminal element. Besides murdering innocent civilians under the guise of Islam, ISIS has been funding itself through extortion, robbing banks and extracting tolls on infidels. As a ragtag band of religiously fantatical terrorists, it's unclear whether ISIS has used any of that money to benefit the supporters whom it claims to have liberated. In all likelihood, it's plowing the money back into furthering its military goals. Irrespective of that, ISIS is clearly a terrorist organization at heart with perhaps some idealistic adherents mixed in who believe that things will improve once final victory is achieved. The sad thing is that mirrors what many Prussians thought would happen with Hitler.
I don't fear ISIS taking over the United States. I foresee more pinprick attacks at softer targets. A lot of the rhetoric is bluster from someone who so far has found little successful opposition to its aims. Unless and until the world unites to combat this movement, however, it is facing a world war that will make the last two look like intramural scrimmages.
(c) 20145 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles
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