I was shocked by the assassination of former Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe in Nara today. As they pointed out on the news, Japan has very strict gun laws, and a very low level of gun crime. This explains why his wretched assassin made his own. But I do wonder about the assassin’s motives for the murder. It was reported earlier today that the gunman, a former sailor in the Japanese navy, didn’t have a political grudge against Abe. But they said on the news this evening that he thought Abe was a member of a particular organisation, and it wasn’t known if this organisation actually existed.
Hmmm.
This sounds like the gunman was a conspiracy theorist in the pejorative sense, like the western nutters who believe that the Illuminati are behind everything evil in the world. Or the globalists. Or the Freemasons and/or the Jews. In the 1990s there were reports that there was a nasty wave of anti-Semitism sweeping Japan, and that the country had more anti-Semites than many other countries, even though it had no Jews. One the country’s big industrialists apparently said that the reason America dropped the two nuclear bombs that destroyed Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but didn’t use them against Germany, was all because of the Jews. It’s pure nonsense. There are two competing explanations for the bombings. One is that after Germany’s surrender, the American high command wished to end the war as quickly as possible. Simply fighting their way island by island across the Pacific until they reached the Japanese mainland would have taken weeks and cost the lives of even more American servicemen. Another theory is that the Americans wanted to send out a message, not to the Japanese, but to Stalin. The Russians hold the Kuril Islands north of Japan, and it seems to me that if this theory is right, then they were afraid the Russians were going to move south and occupy Japan, just as they had liberated and then occupied eastern Europe. As for the origins of the anti-Jewish hatred in the 90s, Lobster wondered if it was a result of American foreign financial policy. I think the Americans had tried to force some financial deal on the Japanese at the behest of their own bankers, and this had disrupted the Japanese economy or its financial sector. It’s possible the gunman believed that Abe was somehow involved in some kind of secret Jewish conspiracy. On the other hand, Abe himself was clearly Japanese, not Jewish, so the assassin may have believed that he was a member of the Illuminati or globalists without the anti-Semitic elements in the theory. Perhaps more information about the killer and his motives will come out later.
Whatever the killer’s motive, a leading Japanese politician has been killed and the country’s people are shock. I deeply sympathise with them in this hour, and wish them all the best following this act of terror.