By Eric Zuesse

To Oppose Far-Right Is Labeled ‘Far-Right'

Japanese politicians get called ‘far-right’ for opposing America’s empowering nazism In Ukraine, and for opposing Japan’s nationalist leader, Shinzo Abe.

Former Japanese Prime Minister tells Crimeans: "It's shameful that information from Japanese and Western media is one-sided.”

Yukio Hatayama, who during 2009 and 2010 had been the first and only non-LDP, or non-one-party-state, Prime Minister of Japan (and he was then quickly ousted by the LDP), said in Crimea on Tuesday, March 10th, that Japan should not be so totally controlled by the U.S. Government, and that, "It's shameful that information from Japanese and Western media is one-sided.” Hatayama also praised “the happy, peaceful life in Crimea,” as opposed to the war-torn and economically collapsing Ukraine, which the IMF, EU and especially the U.S., keep lending money to pay Ukraine to bomb the residents in Ukraine’s strongly anti-fascist eastern area.

Japan’s LDP Foreign Minister, Fumio Kishida, promptly dismissed the Hatayama statement by saying that it came from a “gaffe-prone” man. Telling the truth is a ‘gaffe.’

Mitsuhiro Kimura, leader of another small anti-U.S.-control-of-Japan party, travelled with Hatayama, and supported this initiative for increasing trade and cultural exchanges with Crimea and with Russia generally. He said that this visit was “historic,” and that "Maybe it will give us a chance to influence Japan's foreign policies and change them.”

The Agence France Presse report on this event referred to Kimura’s party as "the right-wing political group Issuikai,” implicitly suggesting thereby that opposition to U.S. control of Japan is “right-wing.” This propaganda effort aimed to insinuate that since the U.S. had defeated the fascist Government of Japan in 1945, the LDP, which the U.S. installed in Japan post-War, can only be the opposite of fascist.

On 17 May 2007, Britain’s conservative Economist had headlined “Japan’s Ultra-Nationalists: Old Habits Die Hard,” and it reported that Kimura was rabble-rousing, and that Japan’s Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said that Kimura and other “ultra-nationalist” politicians in Japan constituted a “threat to democracy.” The Economist also noted, however, ironically, that:

“It was Mr Abe's own grandfather, Nobusuke Kishi, who as prime minister cemented ties between the government, the uyoku dantai and the mob back in 1960, when he enlisted yakuza help against left-wing opponents of Japan's alliance with America."

Abe is considered, by the U.S. and its allies, to be “conservative,” instead of “far-right."

Anyway, the Western press seem united in identifying today's United States as being not “far-right” but instead somehow the enemy of the far-right. George Orwell wrote about that media-strategy, in his novel 1984. Unfortunately, the strategy works, and it reigns now more, perhaps, than ever before.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of They're Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010, and of CHRIST’S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity .