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The occupation authority under MacArthur took steps to break up the zaibatsu through anti-monopoly laws and, in some cases, by removing their heads to allow younger managers to rise through the ranks. Steps were taken to liberalise share ownership so that control of the vital industries would not be in the hands of a select few. As with the political and military leadership, this policy was brought to an abrupt halt in order to facilitate an accelerated economic recovery with the help of some of the wartime business elite. As Kennan wrote in another policy paper in 1947, “Recognizing that the former industrial and commercial leaders of Japan are the ablest leaders in the country, that they are the most stable element, that they have the strongest natural ties with the US, it should be US policy to remove obstacles to their finding their natural level in Japanese leadership.”ix In accordance with this assessment, the restrictions on share-ownership that had been placed on businesses were lifted, allowing the formation of the large conglomerates that have dominated the Japanese economy ever since. These groups, known as keiretsu, were often directly descended from the pre-war zaibatsu, as is the case with three of the ‘Big Six’ – Mitsui, Mitsubishi and Sumitomo.x
As for Germany, following the war there were more persistent attempts to remove all influences of Nazi ideology in the post-war period, but as in the case of Japan the demands of the Cold War required that the West overlook the past activities of key figures in the post-war government of West Germany. In total, fewer than 500 Nazis were convicted for their roles in the Holocaust. As in Japan, former politicians connected to the old regime were able to reach high office in the new, democratic Germany. For example, Hans Globke who co-authored a commentary on the Nuremberg race laws in 1936.xi This served as a manual for judges, concentration camp guards and Wehrmacht officers to understand how to deal with ‘sub-humans’ such as Jews, gypsies and others. After the war, Globke faced no reckoning for his actions and reached the summit of West German bureaucracy, holding the office of State Secretary of the Federal Republic from 1953-63 in the post-occupation government of Konrad Adenauer.
In the German intelligence and security apparatus, there was a continuation of personnel and methods from the Nazi era, as the Allies thought that experienced German officers using existing structures would be better at combating Soviet influence. In the intelligence services, the Gehlen Organisation was formed and headed by Reinhard Gehlen, who had been chief spymaster for the Nazis on the Eastern Front. In the Fifties, with the help of the CIA, this organisation recruited hundreds of former Nazis for covert activities, and at times it even helped former SS officers escape to South America.xii As for the Bundeskriminalamt (BKA), the German equivalent of the FBI, in the post-war years its ranks were full of former security men from the Nazi era, many of whom had previously been tasked with Jews and other ‘suspect’ minorities, who were then sent to the concentration camps. According to research by Dieter Schenk, a former employee of the BKA, “In 1959 the leadership of the BKA consisted of 47 officials—only two of whom were not involved in the activities of the fascists”.xiii
It should be clear therefore that the rebuilding of Germany and Japan was not a process that relied solely on the introduction of new values and ideas, but rather the pre-existing expertise and infrastructure were utilised where possible in the political and economic domains in both societies. Based on this, it seems that trying to reshape Iraq along secular, liberal lines is no guarantee that that land will attain the results seen in the post-war era. It also opens up the possibility that there are alternative models of societal organisation that could bring prosperity and stability to post-Saddam Iraq.
We can state that, for reasons of expediency and geopolitics, the process by which Germany and Japan adopted democracy was not as far reaching as is sometimes claimed. What is not in doubt, however, is that these two countries have not reverted to the militarism of their past. While ideologues such as Kishi and Globke may have returned to positions of power after the war, their former ideologies have been banished from the political arena in both societies. The break with that era in their respective histories has been complete. The success of Japan and Germany in moving on from militaristic, racist ideologies to prosperous, liberal democracies appears to lie in a number of key factors that are absent in many societies around the world, and thus it is unlikely that the same results could be produced as easily elsewhere.
Firstly, the militaristic ideologies that led Germany and Japan to war and conquest were based on the idea that each nation was superior to all others in the world. The vision of a thousand-year Reich had captured the imagination of a large section of the German public, which motivated hundreds of thousands of them to work towards the aims of Nazism. The people were thus confident of continuing victories against their adversaries. In Japan, militarism had fused with Shinto Buddhism to give the people confidence in victory under their divine Emperor. Part of that belief structure was that Japan’s islands had divine protection from invasion and defeat. Thus when these countries suffered humiliating and comprehensive defeat at the hands of ‘inferior’ nations, it proved to the vast majority of people in each society the falsehood of their own ideologies. Thus in the post-war period, while people may have felt they were being treated unfairly under the occupation, no one was prepared to fight to restore the previous system. And since militarist nationalism had only brought failure, there was also a genuine desire for new ideas about how to run society.
In Iraq, or other countries that the U.S. may have in its sights, the regime is oppressive, relying on fear to keep the people down. While the people may be happy to get rid of such tyrannies, it doesn’t necessarily mean that they will question their own values or consider that the fall of the regime represents the failure of their own ideas. Thus it should not be expected that the people would automatically turn to their occupier for instruction on how to build society’s institutions anew. With the case of Iraq, Baathism as a political philosophy may have once had the support of Arab nationalists, but under Saddam, the sole purpose of the party and its thoughts became the preservation of Saddam and his clan. Hence, there is no reason to expect that the millions of people, in Iraq and elsewhere in the region, who reject what they see as decadent Western values that clash with Islam, would now contemplate embracing the American model because of the fall of the Baathist regime.
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