Genocide/Ethnocide: MGT
In “A View of Japan through Japanese Art,” Peter Drucker’s impression of the cultural dynamics of Japan is problematic, in his parsing of elements within the composition of Japanese social topology. It is not that Drucker parses. It is to what end.
The contradictions go unresolved, which – recalling Lao Tzu – might seem to indicate truth. However, lack of literary resolution can be used as a literary device to imply truth, where it is and where it is not.
Hypothetical scenario is another device of literary projection. Let us imagine Daruma, the enlightened foreigner with no limbs, meditating on a Tokyo sidewalk.
What would be his fate? In a 1996 New York Times article (Kristof, “Outcast Status Worsens Pain of Japan’s Disabled”): “Japan lacks any law prohibiting discrimination against the handicapped, although advocates for the disabled are trying to change that;” And “The idea was that if you’re born deformed, you should be concealed as much as possible;” “…that view still survives in some households.”
Although the subsequent decade has produced some changes, Daruma would still likely experience tremendous prejudice in Japan, as a handicapped person.
The social topology of Japan, as we have noted, is infused with Bushido. The warrior way of Bushido has little tolerance for infirmity or weakness.
“The samurai of thirty years ago had behind him a thousand years of training in the law of honor, obedience, duty, and self-sacrifice….. It was not needed to create or establish them. As a child he had but to be instructed, as indeed he was from his earliest years, in the etiquette of self-immolation. The fine instinct of honor demanding it was in the very blood…” [1896, Feudal and Modern Japan (May)]
In his essay, Drucker asks, “Is it still possible for Japan to encapsulate and transmute into Japan-ness the foreign, the non-Japanese, culture, behavior, ethics, and even aesthetics?” It seems the answer is: Yes, selectively.
For instance, when the Germans introduced Japan to the concept of eugenics, the Japanese were topologically prepared to embrace it. In this instance Japan is indeed conceptual. The mutual consequences of this West-East cultural exchange are not definitively calculable. What can be said about it is that in the aftermath, both countries embarked on campaigns of brutal conquest, and both conducted crimes against humanity, including forced eugenics on innocents. Both enthusiastically pursued programs of racial perfection through combined scientific, military, economic, aesthetic, philosophical, political and social means. Japan and Germany were monsters.
The general justification for modern eugenics is the same wherever it is used: the preservation of racial purity, the strengthening of the bloodlines and the perfection of the idealized traits that makes the nation powerful and great. To pretend that the phenomenon of eugenics is somehow new, however, is to ignore the long, and in many instances, horrifying, practice of biological selection conducted by humans on each other. Genocide and ethnocide is nothing new. The use of modern science to enhance or innovate the process is what’s new.
When the warriors of Israel practiced it, as chronicled in the Old Testament, genocide was painted (in shades of crimson) as a function of divine will. This is also true of European Christian holocausts. In another, much less known case, the English attempted to eradicate “that damnable sept of thieves,” the Mac Iains of Glencoe as a matter of civic improvement, if not explicit racial prejudice colored by colonial sensibilities and ancient subliminal malice. “Mi run mor nan gall:” the great hatred of the highlander by the lowlander, is how the Scots described it.
The orders read thus:
You are hereby ordered to fall upon the rebels the Macdonalds of Glenco, and put all to the sword under 70. You are to have special care, that the old fox and his sons do upon no account escape your hands; you are to secure all the avenues, that no man escape. This you are to put in execution at five a clock in the morning precisely, and by that time or very shortly after it, I’lle strive to be with you with a stronger party; if I do not come at five, you are not to tarry for me, but to fall on. This is by the King’s SPECIAL COMMAND for the good and safety of the country, that these miscreants may be cutt off, root and branch. See that this be put in execution without feud or favour, else you may be expected to be treated as not true to the King or government, nor a man fit to carry commission in the King’s service. Expecting that you will not fail in fulfilling hereby, as you love yourself. [February 1, 1692 (Paterson)]
The extirpation of this clan is chronicled in depth, making Glencoe the first instance in history of a governmental conspiracy, travelling through the channels of documented organizational management, to the bayonet-point of military execution upon a tribal people. As is more often than not the case, as borne out in the waveform nature of history, this act of savagery perpetrated by a nation through the various institutional tools at its disposal, involving governmental and extra-governmental dynamics, failed to succeed. It is always hard to exterminate a race of people, and the consequences of attempting to do so - whatever it is called in the currency of language, and by whatever means it is carried out – are unforeseeable and far-reaching.
Today, the Israel-Palestinian conflict is conflated in shades, as perception via electronic globalization has evolved into a dimensional construct. Virtually any issue is rendered in the tonal spectrum of critical response. The international media can and sometimes does provide of sphere of perspectives on any given issue or happening, especially via the web. Not all the world is wired, certainly. (In fact, reviewing data on global internet access is an excellent point of departure for nearly any dimensional investigation of the machinations of global management among the three sectors.)
The role of corporate media is to pounce on the latest episode of news cycle fodder in order to, at least to the degree that the subject is valuable or affects corporate interests, integrate the story into an overarching narrative. Noam Chomsky and Marshall McLuhan were pioneers in parsing data in the shifting tides of information inundation and manipulation, to reveal how perception is managed by global minorities wielding power over majority interests.
Genocide and ethnocide are as old as mankind. Today, after hundreds of years of practice, they are fields of management.
