The Weaponization of Victimhood: Be Careful What You Wish For

I’m reading the brilliant book “Judgment at Tokyo” by Gary J. Bass on the Tokyo Trial of Japanese war criminals at the end of WW2, and I’m really struck by the description of how Japan sold the narrative for their colonial conquest of Asia.

And I’m even more struck by the fact that, at least at the beginning of their conquests, their message was actually cheered by many in Asia. Which I think holds many lessons for the present day.

In the beginning of the 20th century, there was tremendous anger and - very justified - resentment in Asia at the gross unfairness of Western dominance and colonialism. Unfortunately something that's still all too understandable today.

Remember this was a time when most of Asia was colonized by the West: Britain had India along with Burma, Malaya, Singapore, and Ceylon (modern-day Sri Lanka); France controlled Indochina (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia); the Netherlands ruled the vast Dutch East Indies (modern-day Indonesia); Portugal held East Timor, and Goa; and the United States had taken the Philippines from Spain. Even nominally independent countries like China had big swaths of its territory carved up into foreign concessions and outright colonies, like Hong Kong (by Britain), Macau (by Portugal) and Taiwan (by Japan). They don’t call that period the “Century of humiliation” for nothing…

At the time, Japan was the only Asian power that not only hadn’t been colonized but that was a military and economic force on par with the West.

They had reached this status by famously emulating the West during its “Meiji restoration” period in the mid 19th century, with Japanese leaders recognizing that the only way for them to avoid having to submit to the West as a victim was to compete with them as an equal - mastering the very tools of power that had made Western dominance possible (a modern army, an industrial economy, etc.)

The problem is that they didn’t only copy the West in their mastery of tools of power, they also started to copy them in their behavior too, starting with seizing Taiwan from China in 1895 and taking control of Korea over the next few years.

It was surprising to me to read in the book that, save from China and Korea themselves, the first victims of Japanese aggression, many in Asia initially welcomed Japan's rise and even its early conquests - seeing them not as the beginning of a new imperialism, but as proof that an Asian power could successfully challenge Western dominance.

In fact when in 1905 Japan sank most of the Russian fleet in a spectacularly decisive battle in the Tsushima Strait, led by Admiral Togo Heihachiro, people across Asia were absolutely elated at this first modern triumph of an Asian power over a European empire.

Jawaharlal Nehru, who went on the become India’s first Prime Minister upon the country’s independence, wrote to a relative: “Three Cheers for Togo” upon hearing the news of Japan’s victory.

Even Gandhi, then a youthful lawyer in South Africa, wrote that when Japan’s “brave heroes forced the Russians to bite the dust of the battle-field, the sun rose in the east. And it now shines on all the nations of Asia. The people of the East will never, never again submit to insult from the insolent whites.”

A few years after becoming the first Asian to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913, Rabindranath Tagore, the great Bengali poet and educator, gave a lecture tour in Japan where he cheered the country for having “broken the spell under which we lay in torpor for ages, taking it to be the normal condition of certain races living in certain geographical limits.”

Japan, seeing how strongly this “Asians defeating the West” narrative resonated in Asia, made it their main propaganda arc: they decided to frame their own imperialism and colonialism as a fight for justice, positioning themselves not as conquerors but as liberators freeing their Asian brothers from the yoke of white supremacy and coining slogans like “Asia for Asians” and the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere.”

Japanese Lieutenant General Matsui Iwane, who would command Japanese troops in the Nanjing massacre, declared that Japan had a “divinely appointed mission” to help liberate Asia. When Japan conquered Manchuria - the Northeast of China - he pledged to “extend to the 400 million people of China the same help and deep sympathy that we have given Manchuria,” and then help all “the Asian peoples who share our race and stock.”

As prime minister, Prince Konoe Fumimaro elevated pan-Asianism into an official justification for the full-scale invasion of China in 1937. In a major radio address early in the war, he declared that Japan understood “China’s racial aspiration and sentiment.”

Propaganda booklets, such as the one pictured below, were published and distributed throughout Asia, featuring cheerful images of Japanese soldiers on horseback smiling benevolently at grateful Asian children, maps showing Japan “driving away” Western forces, and messages about Asian peoples working together “like brothers and sisters.”

This was all, as we now obviously understand in hindsight, a form of weaponization of victimhood. Asians were real victims of Western colonialism, of course, but this also meant that many of them were particularly eager to believe in any alternative to it - making them vulnerable to manipulation by anyone clever enough to wrap their own imperial ambitions in anti-colonial rhetoric.

Even Lee Kuan Yew himself - the legendary founder of Singapore - was at first impressed by Japan. In his memoirs, he recalled being dazzled by the British getting defeated by the Japanese in Singapore, thrilled to witness “the end of the British Empire.” However, suffering afterwards under Japanese colonialism, he soon realized that they were, as he wrote, “more cruel, more brutal, more unjust and more vicious than the British.”

It might even be true that the Japanese leaders themselves believed in their own rhetoric; it probably wasn’t even cynical. It’s human nature: people have a remarkable capacity for convincing themselves that their selfish self-interest aligns with moral good. And it’s a fact that most imperial powers throughout history have managed to convince themselves that their domination was actually a form of benevolence.

Heck you just need to look at contemporary American rhetoric around their “exceptionalism” to see it. When Madeleine Albright said “If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. We stand tall. We see further into the future,” there’s a very good chance that she probably believed it. Same thing for Obama when he told troops in Iraq: “Because of you – because you sacrificed so much for a people that you had never met, Iraqis have a chance to forge their own destiny. That’s part of what makes us special as Americans. Unlike the empires of old, we did so not for territory or for resources. We do it because it’s right.”

Yes, it sounds like the height of delusion, but this kind of moral self-justification seems to be psychologically necessary for imperial powers - no one wants to see themselves as the villain, so they create elaborate narratives about liberation, civilization, and benevolence. Self-deception is a very potent force.

This all brings me to what lessons this all holds for today, because unfortunately we can see this exact same playbook being used right now in truly frightening ways.