A New And Militant Rising Sun?

Go read Steve Clemons piece today on the rise of ultra-right thuggery in Japan. Pressure from the Japanese version of the neocons has resulted in the closing of a moderate website just because it advocated caution in the current push towards a new Japanese militaristic and expansionist policy.

These guys should not be push-overs for a history-denying cabal of right-wing thugs who want to take Japan back to the 1930s. But as things stand right now, word is that Satoh and Miyagawa are yielding to the pressure stirred up by the Sankei Shimbun's Komori. If they succeed in the campaign against Tamamoto, these right-wingers will find themselves intoxicated with success and think about what other public intellectuals they can savage and have pushed out of their jobs. It will become mechanical, outrageous, and disturbingly reminiscent of what Japan's right wingers did to public intellectuals in the build up to World War II.

America's ultra-right - not one of whom seems to want to stand up on their hind legs and admit the logical consequences of their current rhetoric about liberal "traitors" - could only wish they had the pull that their Japanese co-thuggees have. I've written about their campaign to restore Imperial glory previously.

While we are all concentrating on the Middle east as far as scary blowback from neocon foreign misadventures is concerned, there's just as big a blowback from America's neocon example brewing in the Pacific.