Exposing the “Powers”: Japan, Germany, and the United or Confederate States

I have long wanted to write a fact-based novel portraying what Walter Wink calls the “powers.”[1] The “powers” refers to the spirit or personality of a country or group of people which is larger than the sum total of its parts. The peculiar “spirit” or power I have encountered in both Japan and the United States is remarkable in its capacity to shape and blind people to their history (e.g. war crimes, the enslavement of other peoples) and as a result of this blindness to continue to oppress (and, of course, I am thinking of the present moment in this country in which the blindness to racism is being made evident).

Japanese citizens resemble those in post war Germany, in counting themselves the primary victims of their military and governmental leaders during World War II. Very few admit to any sort of guilt on the part of the Emperor, their own family, or within themselves. Though Germany also experienced this victim mentality, counting themselves the ultimate and worst victims of the war and portraying a blindness to the near universal support of Hitler, the philosopher, Susan Neiman, describes how Germans, over a period of decades, have confronted their past through memorials, official acts of remembrance, and reparations.[2] Otherwise Germans might see themselves as victims, on the order of Southerners who continue to imagine the lost cause of the Confederacy was just and heroic.

Even slight acquaintance with the history of the Confederate States dispels the pervasive narrative that the Civil War was about States’ Rights. The point of secession was, according to the Confederacy’s Vice President, Alexander Stephens, to correct the United States Constitution: “The Constitution… rested upon the equality of races. This was an error. Our new government is founded upon exactly the opposite idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests, upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” Stephens deploys biblical language, referring to Christ, to describe slavery as the cornerstone of Southern States: “This stone which was rejected by the first builders ‘is become the chief of the corner’—the real ‘corner-stone’—in our new edifice.” The reason for secession and the resulting war was to establish “a new government . . . upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man.” The Christian language deployed lends the strongest of terms to the religious-like commitment to slavery, which stood at the heart of the Confederacy.

Perhaps we would also witness defense of Nazi statuary and Nazi memorials, rather than holocaust memorials, if it weren’t for the particular history in East and West Germany which required the deconstruction of German history. Neiman traces the efforts of clergy, the publication of memoirs of survivors, the production of films and books, and the pressure of various government officials in efforts to change the narrative of “Germans as victims.” A growing self-awareness and broad German acknowledgment of complicity in the rise of Hitler has required a decades long struggle.

This self-awareness or any acknowledgement of corporate guilt is mostly missing in Japan, a blindness which is also intimately connected to the dominance of right-wing politics and attitudes in educational institutions and in the culture as a whole. The Japanese equivalent of Nazi memorials or Confederate statues is the Yasukuni Shrine commemorating Hideki Tojo (the wartime prime minister) and 13 other war criminals (along with millions of war dead) as Japanese deities. Nearly every government, since the end of the war, has worshipped at this shrine, marking the right leaning nationalism of post-war Japan. These same governments have continued to cover up war crimes, and have resisted text book entries which include “aggression in” China (it was, government representatives insist, an “advance”) and have instead focused on the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[3] While we were in Japan the Ministry of Education mandated the singing of the Kimigayo (the national anthem indicating the deity of the Emperor) before the Hinomaru (the national flag) at graduation and entrance ceremonies (which fits with right wing goals and a nationalist slant on Japanese history). State powers are at work in institutions, in corporate culture, often marked by peculiar cruelties in schools and in the workplace. The point being that personal attitudes, corporate attitudes, and the political reality of the country, are all quite interconnected and traceable in people’s daily lives.

 In my would be historical fictional portrayal of my real experience of a small town, a psychoanalytic researcher is dispatched to Hartdale, Texas to diagnose how an entire community has become subject to a mysterious malign force. The specific phenomena developed in the research pertains to “research on violence and identity as a corporate and learned process.” What our intrepid researcher discovers, is that while the community imagines itself built on the redemptive act destroying the Bloody Benders (this part of the story is true – the Benders and their demise), this final act of violence, the very act related to the establishment of Hartdale, had a corporate and individual impact. The violence that “saved” Hartdale and the myths that surround this violence turns out to have slowly impacted the lives of many its citizens.

The point of this book that will never be written is that, given the right tools, I believe the story could be told of how the corporate personalities, the schools, the churches, the communities, in which we have our life can also be exposed in the ways they would destroy life. There is a hidden center, an idolatrous violence, which corruptly organizes the powers. This is most obvious among the “possessed,” those suffering PTSD, or those who commit acts of violence, as those subjected to violence and oppression bear traceable marks of their trauma. Lonnie Athens, in his doctoral studies, interviewed hundreds of violent criminals to arrive at a pattern which he calls “violentization.” He discovered that those who commit the worst forms of violence have themselves been exposed to consistent and predictable levels of violence as children. Would this not hold true for corporate personalities or to what Paul refers to as the principalities and powers, or those corporate personalities of states, towns, and smaller groups of people? They must bear a peculiar history that explains how they may have gone bad or become either good or demonic.

In Japan, religion is at stake in the worship at Yasukuni Shrine and in the peculiar religious nationalism surrounding the Hinomaru and Kimigayo. In Germany, it was clearly something on the order of a religious blindness that refused corporate acceptance of national complicity in the rise of National Socialism. In my real-fictional Hartdale it becomes possible to trace the genealogy of violence in a community founded on originary violence in individual lives. We want and perhaps require heroic ancestors, a heroic nation, or a heroic history. At the very least, we would see ourselves as victims of violence, rather than its perpetrators. Confrontation with this lie we would tell ourselves about our identity must be the essential part of what Paul describes as the exposure and witness to the principalities and powers.

The debate over Confederate statues and the Confederate flag concerns founding myths and how we order our lives and it raises the question of whether that history will be confronted and exposed or whether it will continue to support an ethos of violence and oppression.


[1] C.S. Lewis’ novel, That Hideous Strength, may be the sort of work I am thinking of but in my story the spiritual and fantastic would be replaced by more ordinary developments (which probably would not make for a very good novel).

[2] Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil, See https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-confront-a-racist-national-history

[3] Through the life-long efforts of Saburo Ienaga the most widely used Japanese textbooks in the mid- and late-1990s contained references to the Nanjing Massacre, anti-Japanese resistance movements in Korea, forced suicide in Okinawa, comfort women, and Unit 731 (responsible for conducting medical experiments on prisoners of war)—all issues raised in Ienaga’s suits.


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Author: Paul Axton

Paul V. Axton spent 30 years in higher education teaching theology, philosophy, and Bible. Paul’s Ph.D. work and book bring together biblical and psychoanalytic understandings of peace and the blog, podcast, and PBI are shaped by this emphasis.

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