Posts Tagged ‘Shinzo Abe’

Is Shinzo Abe’s Assassin a Conspiracy Nutter?

July 8, 2022

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.

RT Footage of Workers’ Protests against Trump and Japanese Prime Minister

November 6, 2017

RT has put up this short clip of less than a minute in length, showing workers demonstrating in Tokyo against Donald Trump, who has gone on an official visit of their country, and their Prime Minister, Shinzo Abe.

The brief description for the video runs

Thousands of protesters took to the streets of Tokyo on Sunday in occasion of the 20th National Worker’s Meeting, to protest against the policies of Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and the visit of US President Donald Trump.
Protesters contested Abe’s economic plans in the realm of company privatisation, the country’s nuclear power policies and the US troops’ presence in Japan among other things.

The marchers bang drum, and as well as carrying placards, many of them also wear headbands bearing slogan. Some of the placards have the slogans in English ‘No War’, ‘No Poverty’, ‘No Trump’. Trump and Abe are hanged in effigy, and there’s a performance in which a man, masked and dressed as Trump, is attacked and buried under cardboard boxes, bearing the words ‘War’, ‘Poverty’, ‘Kairoshi’. I’ve no idea what the last means, except it’s probably a very Japanese concept describing some godawful aspect of the present administration.

I am really not at all surprised that Japanese working people are protesting. As is notorious, they work extremely hard, but the continuing problems of the Japanese economy mean that people are being laid off, and there is very little in the way of a state welfare system to support them. A few years ago the BBC did a piece on the current state of the Japanese economy, and showed some of the victims living in tents under a bridge. One of these poor homeless souls came up to explain a few things to the programme’s host. According to the presenter, it was a bitter complaint about the government and the economy.

I am also not at all surprised at their anger against Trump. The orange buffoon’s aggressive stance towards North Korea, threatening to go to nuclear war with the Stalinist thug, is obviously going to frighten a nation that stands pretty much in the firing line. The last missile North Korea lobbed in America’s direction overflew them. The Japanese people probably remember only too well the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and are all too horrified by the prospect of a repeat.

The presence of American troops in Japan, where there’s a base on the island of Okinawa, is another major source of irritation. You may remember that there were also massive demonstrations against it a few years ago. I think that while the Cold War was on and Communism remained a threat, real or perceived, the Japanese were prepared to accept it. But now the Japanese, or at least a sizable part of them, see it as American occupation.