Ringo
Gold Member
Talking about the lure of American influence. The case of Japan allows our self-destructive friends to believe that if the Americans come, the country will experience an economic miracle. Let's get to the bottom of this.
I have no ambitions to cover the entire history of Japan in one tweet, but I will allow myself to mention that Americans arrived there in the middle of the 19th century.
I need this to point out how long Western elites have been good at PR.
If today they come in without knocking and in shoddy slippers under the aegis of urgent democracy for all, then the idea of progress served as an excuse, and it was somehow indecent to oppose it. Are they savages? At that time the British with their opium schemes were progressing in China, and the Americans sailed to Japan, which was closed in every sense, demonstrated the achievements of progress in weapons development, the Japanese looked at their antique guns and signed a "treaty of friendship", followed by trade treaties.
Japan was on its way to China, there was no competition there, and whalers could use an extra base in the Pacific. The Americans, who soon became bogged down in the civil war, could not capitalize, and other countries rushed into the hole they had made.
Even before World War I, Japan had one of the highest rates of economic growth on the planet. A talented people, accustomed to extracting wealth by their own labor in the face of scarcity of resources.
After World War II, Japan suffered a huge number of casualties, impoverished citizens, two uninhabitable cities, economic decline and colonization of the country by Western elites, which the Japanese rulers tried their best to prevent.
You could say they were lucky, there was nothing to take from them, China was finally leaning towards the Soviet Union, the States needed to raise an antagonist under its side. And the American occupation did bring the Japanese a democratic constitution, political stability, successful liberal reforms, and American money - the famous economic miracle. Plus, the marketers have washed up the communists - what could be better? Isn't this occupation so bad?
Japan literally flooded the world with automobiles, ships, optics, electrical equipment, radios, cameras, and televisions. It had technologically overtaken the United States and was about to become the world's first economy. And what happened next? That's right, the US discovered a threat to national security. And America was struck with a paranoid fear of the Japanese.
American industrialists, technological engineers and farmers appealed to Congress with demands to introduce protectionist measures, because European and Japanese goods were successfully displacing them both in foreign markets and inside America. The U.S. ran huge budget deficits while Germany and Japan ran surpluses.
In 1985, the G5 met in New York's Plaza Hotel, where the Americans decided that Germany and Japan must reduce the competitiveness of their economies, and Washington would henceforth regulate the exchange rates of their currencies. Fair competition has the right to exist as long as it works for the benefit of who knows who. Those who oppose free-market opponents. The countries under occupation had to agree. While Germany, which was already a member of the proto-EU, the European Monetary Union, and then received the GDR, coped, Japan did not.
As a consolation, the Japanese were given cheap loans, which were worse than nuclear weapons, and it is worth writing a separate thread about them. The country's industry, which became uncompetitive, shook, Japanese exports became more expensive, demand in Europe and the US fell, manufacturers began to cut jobs, but the real estate and stock market bubble burst.
Businessmen basked in luxury, ordinary citizens fell into euphoria, they invested in the ever-increasing price of shares in companies that were on the verge of bankruptcy and had no one to sell their products to. Shares were even sold in supermarkets. And then one day, when Japanese assets were subjected to a brutal sell-off and the Nikkei stock index collapsed, the bubble burst. Many Japanese lost their savings, about 30% of Japanese industry was bought up by Americans, and most importantly, the nation lost the drive it had enjoyed in the post-war years.
Japan's debt to this day is 263% of GDP, and according to analysis by Japanese economists, the country has no way to pay it off. So Japan is faltering under the forces of economic stagnation, chronic debt and nuclear catastrophe, and there of course appears the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. George Soros and the Goldman Sachs group have pounced on what's left of the mortally wounded economy and have once again struck gold. There are rumors that these same individuals were behind the Japanese stock market crash, but I have no proof. If you have any, please write.
I have written a lot, but it is impossible not to mention that the burden of remorse, the partial loss of national identity, the rapid Americanization of everyday life and social relations in a highly traditional society like Japan's has produced strange distortions in the mind.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
Our jaws drop when modern Japanese thank the Americans for the nuclear bombings, which "did some good". They say that everything is right, we were developing bacteriological weapons, "death factories" were working, inhuman experiments on people were conducted. How do you get into people's brains?
Needless to say, as a result of the bombing, ordinary citizens died and died of cancer, while the head of Unit 731, Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii and other officers received immunity from persecution when they agreed to hand over all the developments of inhumane experiments to the American occupation administration?
This really isn't a story about a banana republic ruined and destroyed or an oil-rich African country.
This is a story about the fact that sovereignty does not lie on the road, wars are better not to lose, and mutually beneficial cooperation with the States from the position of a mephedrone whore always ends with the fact that sooner or later you will have to make a decision favorable to your Western partners, not you, at the cost of your own future.
By and large, only strong adversaries can be friends and cooperate with strong states.
I have no ambitions to cover the entire history of Japan in one tweet, but I will allow myself to mention that Americans arrived there in the middle of the 19th century.
I need this to point out how long Western elites have been good at PR.
If today they come in without knocking and in shoddy slippers under the aegis of urgent democracy for all, then the idea of progress served as an excuse, and it was somehow indecent to oppose it. Are they savages? At that time the British with their opium schemes were progressing in China, and the Americans sailed to Japan, which was closed in every sense, demonstrated the achievements of progress in weapons development, the Japanese looked at their antique guns and signed a "treaty of friendship", followed by trade treaties.
Japan was on its way to China, there was no competition there, and whalers could use an extra base in the Pacific. The Americans, who soon became bogged down in the civil war, could not capitalize, and other countries rushed into the hole they had made.
Even before World War I, Japan had one of the highest rates of economic growth on the planet. A talented people, accustomed to extracting wealth by their own labor in the face of scarcity of resources.
After World War II, Japan suffered a huge number of casualties, impoverished citizens, two uninhabitable cities, economic decline and colonization of the country by Western elites, which the Japanese rulers tried their best to prevent.
You could say they were lucky, there was nothing to take from them, China was finally leaning towards the Soviet Union, the States needed to raise an antagonist under its side. And the American occupation did bring the Japanese a democratic constitution, political stability, successful liberal reforms, and American money - the famous economic miracle. Plus, the marketers have washed up the communists - what could be better? Isn't this occupation so bad?
Japan literally flooded the world with automobiles, ships, optics, electrical equipment, radios, cameras, and televisions. It had technologically overtaken the United States and was about to become the world's first economy. And what happened next? That's right, the US discovered a threat to national security. And America was struck with a paranoid fear of the Japanese.
American industrialists, technological engineers and farmers appealed to Congress with demands to introduce protectionist measures, because European and Japanese goods were successfully displacing them both in foreign markets and inside America. The U.S. ran huge budget deficits while Germany and Japan ran surpluses.
In 1985, the G5 met in New York's Plaza Hotel, where the Americans decided that Germany and Japan must reduce the competitiveness of their economies, and Washington would henceforth regulate the exchange rates of their currencies. Fair competition has the right to exist as long as it works for the benefit of who knows who. Those who oppose free-market opponents. The countries under occupation had to agree. While Germany, which was already a member of the proto-EU, the European Monetary Union, and then received the GDR, coped, Japan did not.
As a consolation, the Japanese were given cheap loans, which were worse than nuclear weapons, and it is worth writing a separate thread about them. The country's industry, which became uncompetitive, shook, Japanese exports became more expensive, demand in Europe and the US fell, manufacturers began to cut jobs, but the real estate and stock market bubble burst.
Businessmen basked in luxury, ordinary citizens fell into euphoria, they invested in the ever-increasing price of shares in companies that were on the verge of bankruptcy and had no one to sell their products to. Shares were even sold in supermarkets. And then one day, when Japanese assets were subjected to a brutal sell-off and the Nikkei stock index collapsed, the bubble burst. Many Japanese lost their savings, about 30% of Japanese industry was bought up by Americans, and most importantly, the nation lost the drive it had enjoyed in the post-war years.
Japan's debt to this day is 263% of GDP, and according to analysis by Japanese economists, the country has no way to pay it off. So Japan is faltering under the forces of economic stagnation, chronic debt and nuclear catastrophe, and there of course appears the fourth horseman of the apocalypse. George Soros and the Goldman Sachs group have pounced on what's left of the mortally wounded economy and have once again struck gold. There are rumors that these same individuals were behind the Japanese stock market crash, but I have no proof. If you have any, please write.
I have written a lot, but it is impossible not to mention that the burden of remorse, the partial loss of national identity, the rapid Americanization of everyday life and social relations in a highly traditional society like Japan's has produced strange distortions in the mind.
Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world.
Our jaws drop when modern Japanese thank the Americans for the nuclear bombings, which "did some good". They say that everything is right, we were developing bacteriological weapons, "death factories" were working, inhuman experiments on people were conducted. How do you get into people's brains?
Needless to say, as a result of the bombing, ordinary citizens died and died of cancer, while the head of Unit 731, Lieutenant General Shiro Ishii and other officers received immunity from persecution when they agreed to hand over all the developments of inhumane experiments to the American occupation administration?
This really isn't a story about a banana republic ruined and destroyed or an oil-rich African country.
This is a story about the fact that sovereignty does not lie on the road, wars are better not to lose, and mutually beneficial cooperation with the States from the position of a mephedrone whore always ends with the fact that sooner or later you will have to make a decision favorable to your Western partners, not you, at the cost of your own future.
By and large, only strong adversaries can be friends and cooperate with strong states.