kontextmaschine:

Hot take: insofar as it represented domestic capital and labor overcoming divisions to cooperate in a project of national uplift amidst liberal use of canned slogans and mass gatherings and the suppression of leftist mass action, Japan’s postwar recovery was more fascist than its interwar period

@plum-soup said: I mean post war Japanese government has been very much been defined by the recruiting of former Japanese fascists, war criminals, etc to form the LDP and make sure an American friendly government maintained a stranglehold on Japanese politics. So yeah, fascism

Maybe there’s something in the way the South Korean government was pretty lineally descended from the Japanese occupation compradors too, and under the postwar settlement these two states took parallel paths, but both of self-directed development within a First World order.

And that was the capitalists’ Cold War pitch: operate within a multilateral capitalist order and you’ll be able to become a rich developed country.

And that was also the communists’: “the capitalists’ plan is really just to put the fascists back in charge!”

Well?