{"id":2889,"date":"2009-04-04T00:10:55","date_gmt":"2009-04-03T15:10:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=2889"},"modified":"2009-04-04T00:11:46","modified_gmt":"2009-04-03T15:11:46","slug":"tangent-1940-herblock-cartoon-on-inaction-towards-hitler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/?p=2889","title":{"rendered":"Tangent: 1940 Herblock cartoon on inaction towards Hitler"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Handbook<\/a>\"\\\"<\/a>\"Foreign<\/a>\"\\\"<\/a>\"\u300c\u30b8\u30e3\u30d1\u30cb\u30fc\u30ba\u30fb\u30aa\u30f3\u30ea\u30fc\u3000\u5c0f\u6a3d\u5165\u6d74\u62d2\u5426\u554f\u984c\u3068\u4eba\u7a2e\u5dee\u5225\u300d\uff08\u660e\u77f3\u66f8\u5e97\uff09\"<\/a>\"JAPANESE<\/a>\"sourstrawberriesavatar\"<\/a>
\nHi Blog. \u00a0Little tangent on a Saturday. \u00a0My travel reading was HERBLOCK: \u00a0A CARTOONIST’S LIFE, by Herbert Block<\/a>. \u00a0He’s that cartoonist who caricatured presidential administrations from Hoover to Clinton. \u00a0I loved his work for its prescience and insight.<\/p>\n

My favorite cartoon out of the 200 in the book was one about Hitler in 1940. \u00a0Have a gander:<\/p>\n

\"herblockcartoon001\"<\/p>\n

The reason I love this so much is because it demonstrates that inaction towards the inevitable, justified by self-convincing sophistries, is timeless. \u00a0We learned this history in retrospect, where Americans apparently took up arms promptly against a clearly evil foe, came to Europe’s aid, vanquished the Axis Powers and saved the world. \u00a0Not so. \u00a0As this cartoon illustrates brilliantly, it took nearly a decade of dithering (practically until 1945 before people even believed Nazi Germany had extermination camps!) before people finally did what they had to do. \u00a0Meanwhile, they came up with all sorts of intelligent-sounding arguments to justify doing nothing.<\/p>\n

How does this relate to Debito.org? \u00a0Because we get the same sort of arguments for doing nothing, say, against the evil of clear and present racial discrimination in Japan<\/a>. \u00a0We say it’s some kind of misunderstanding, language, or cultural barrier. \u00a0Or that foreigners brought it upon themselves. \u00a0Or that Japan’s unique culture or long history of being a closed island society makes it special or blind to the issue. \u00a0Or that once the older generation dies out or people travel more or get used to foreigners things will change. \u00a0Or that fundamental attitudes won’t change even if we make a racial discrimination law illegal. \u00a0Or that Japan actually is a fundamentally thoroughbred pure society and should be kept pristine. \u00a0Or that people are imposing outsider values on the poor put-upon Japanese people. \u00a0Or that international treaty is not binding enough to justify a law when we have an adequate judiciary… \u00a0<\/p>\n

There, that’s eight intelligent-sounding pseudo-scientific arguments, just like in the cartoon above.<\/p>\n

But they’re all bullshit. \u00a0There is no getting around the fact we need a law against racial discrimination. \u00a0Now.<\/p>\n

But people, as history shows, will even make arguments for doing nothing against Hitler.<\/p>\n

They are on the wrong side of history.<\/p>\n

Arudou Debito in Sapporo<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A quick tangent for this Saturday: A 1940 Herblock cartoon I found (one of my favorites ever) demonstrating how people will make dithering arguments against the inevitable: in the cartoon’s case against doing something to stop Hitler. Now compare that with the dithering arguments against doing something to stop racial discrimination in Japan, with a law against it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20,26,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-history","category-ironies-hypocrisies","category-tangents"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2889","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2889"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2889\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.debito.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}