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GERMAN TECHNOCRATS WORKING for the Third Reich were great planners too. One of the more shadowy tales of World War II is the cooperation between German planners and their European counterparts under Nazi occupation. Architects, urban planners, builders of dams and motorways, found one another, not as fellow Nazis, but as kindred spirits and fellow engineers of a new European order. For them, too, destruction was often the “exceptional moment” of opportunity.
Rotterdam was the first city in western Europe to have its heart ripped out by bombs. The damage was not as vast as in Warsaw, bombed eight months before Rotterdam in September 1939, but the center of the city was pretty much obliterated. Plans to rebuild Rotterdam were made almost immediately. Unhindered by democratic procedures or private interests, a committee of Dutch urban planners and engineers set out to have the rubble cleared, private property expropriated, and the city rebuilt according to rational blueprints. They were not Nazis; in fact, most were not in the least sympathetic to the German occupiers, but these highly practical men had long been impatient with the indecision, the bickering, and the general messiness of liberal democracy. Much like Jean Monnet, they believed in unified action under strong leadership. In this sense, the Nazi government gave them an opportunity to do what they had wanted all along.
For the Germans, though not necessarily for the Dutch technocrats, there was an important pan-European dimension as well. Rotterdam would be one of the major hubs in a greater region of Germanic peoples. In the racist jargon of the German occupiers, “The Netherlands form a part of the European Lebensraum. As a member of the Germanic tribe, the Dutch people will follow the destiny of this natural bond.”27 There would be no room in the new order for the “plutocratic” prewar liberal market economy. All economies, including the Dutch, would be made to conform to a Continental planned economy (Kontinentalwirtschaft). Collective interests would trump any private interests, unless, of course, those interests happened to be those of Nazi leaders.
The talk about Germanic tribes held no appeal for a man like Dr. J. A. Ringers, the engineer put in charge of rebuilding Rotterdam in 1940. In fact, he was later arrested for helping the Dutch resistance. But he was convinced that planned cities were the right way forward. And in the first few years of the war, the Germans were happy to share their considerable expertise with Ringers and other Dutch technocrats. This didn’t mean they always agreed. German plans to rebuild Rotterdam in the monumental fascist style were not at all what the Dutch had in mind. And, besides, the modernization of Rotterdam was not allowed to come at the expense of German port cities, such as Hamburg or Bremen. So in 1943, by which time Ringers had already been arrested, plans to rebuild came to a halt. But Ringers survived, despite a grueling time in a German concentration camp. As soon as the war was over, he was appointed minister of public works in charge of rebuilding the Netherlands. Ringers would be one of the chief engineers of the Dutch New Jerusalem, whose blueprints owed something to Karl Marx, something to prewar socialist planning, and perhaps a little more to the Nazi occupation than people care to remember.
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THE BIGGEST PLANNERS of all were the Japanese. During the 1930s and early 1940s, Manchukuo, Japan’s Manchurian puppet state, was the most perfectly planned colony in the world, a kind of dream palace of Japanese pan-Asianism. It could not officially be called a colony, of course, as Japan was ostensibly the liberator of Asia from Western imperialism. And since the Japanese empire was also set against “selfish” Western-style free market capitalism, Manchukuo would be not just a pseudo-independent Asian state, but a showcase of collective social justice and egalitarianism. In fact, it was nothing of the sort; Japanese-built mines and factories relied on Chinese slave labor, and life for Chinese and Koreans under the Japanese Kwantung Army was brutal. But the economy, like everything else in the puppet state, was strictly controlled by the military government, and ably assisted in this enterprise by government-favored Japanese industrial companies and banks.
The capital city of Manchukuo, known in Japanese as Shinkyo or New Capital, was little more than a small railway junction called Changchun when the Japanese set up the puppet state in 1932. Almost at once teams of Japanese planners, engineers, architects, and bureaucrats of the South Manchurian Railway and the Kwantung Army set out to design the most modern, most efficient, cleanest, most orderly city in Asia, to be built in the “New Asian” style. Shinkyo’s blueprint bore the marks of Western influence—Haussmann’s Paris, nineteenth-century British ideas on the Garden City, German Bauhaus—but the huge, modernist government buildings would be adorned with gabled Oriental roofs copied from various Japanese temples and Chinese palaces.
On the flat northern Chinese landscape, covered in snow all winter, a brand-new city arose in five years of high-speed construction under the auspices of the State Council of Manchukuo. If Albert Speer had been Japanese, this would have been his monument to totalitarian planning: grandiose bureaucratic fortresses in the New Asian style flanking wide and perfectly straight boulevards leading to massive round plazas like the spokes of a giant wheel.* Everything had been worked out with mathematical precision. And everything worked, from the sleek South Manchurian high-speed railway trains, the “Asia Express” which always ran on time, to the flushing toilets in public housing, an innovation that was unheard of in most homes back in Japan.
The public face of Manchukuo was Chinese, all the way up to Henry Pu’yi, the effete “last emperor” of the Qing Dynasty. Behind his throne and every Chinese official stood a Japanese puppeteer, or “deputy.” To call the Japanese rulers fascists would be inexact. Many of them were militarists, all were Japanese nationalists, and quite a few believed in the pan-Asian ideal of their official propaganda, a new Asia, led by Japan, free from Western-style capitalism and imperialism.
All the military and government bureaucrats were dedicated to planning, unhindered by democratic procedures or the individual interests or desires of Manchukuo’s mostly Chinese subjects. Behind the sinister force of the Kwantung Army, the murderous Kempeitai police, and an assortment of Japanese gangsters and carpetbaggers was an army of highly sophisticated bureaucrats, managers, and engineers who saw the puppet state as a kind of drawing board for running a perfectly planned economy. Their plans were coated in a cultlike imperialism, revolving around the divine Japanese emperor and his royal vassal in the old “Salt Palace” in Shinkyo, the bemused, hapless, and utterly humiliated puppet emperor Pu’yi.
Some Japanese planners were distinctly right-wing in their dedication to conservative military order; some were socialists who shared with the militarists an aversion to free market capitalism. But even the right-wing bureaucrats believed in Soviet-style five-year plans. The typical Manchukuo “reform bureaucrat” might best be described as a right-wing radical who had more in common with communists than with liberals. Kishi Nobusuke was of this type. A suave rabbit-faced bureaucratic operator, Kishi hardly looked like a strongman who ruled over huge numbers of industrial slaves. However, barely forty years old, he was one of the most powerful men in the Japanese empire. His brief was to turn Manchukuo into a state-controlled powerhouse of mining, chemicals, and heavy industries.
Industrial policy was set, not for the profit of businesses and corporations, or not in the first place, and certainly not to satisfy Japanese consumers, who were increasingly squeezed by wartime rationing, but to expand the power of the state. Some companies did very nicely out of this. Nissan, for example, moved its headquarters to Manchukuo in 1937, where, in partnership with the government, it established a new industrial and banking conglomerate, or zaibatsu, making five-year plans and producing everything from military vehicles to torpedo boats. The Mitsubishi zaibatsu manufactured fighter planes, and Mitsui enriched itself and the Manchukuo government by monopolizing the opium trade in China. Two major figures in this sordid business were Ayukawa Gisuke, founder of the Nissan corporation, and Kishi Nobusuke, the industrial bureaucrat whose contacts with the criminal underworld would always be carefully maintained. But the interests of big business and the military did not always coincide. Even Ayukawa disapproved of Japan’s alliance with Nazi Germany. War with Britain and the U.S. was not necessarily good for business, and corporations, even when they benefited from special tax breaks and subsidies, did not always take kindly to bureaucratic interference.
What Kishi and others pioneered in Manchukuo was later put into practice in Japan itself. From the beginning of the war in China, in 1937, till the end of the Pacific War, the Japanese economy was effectively controlled by such government organs as the Cabinet Planning Board, the Finance Ministry, and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry. The men who ran the war economy were recruited from the same network of reform bureaucrats, strategic planners, and antiliberal ideologues from left and right who had industrialized Manchukuo with callous efficiency. The minister of Commerce and Industry was none other than Kishi Nobusuke himself. In 1943, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry was renamed Ministry of Munitions, more in keeping with the true nature of the Japanese war economy. Kishi, officially as vice munitions minister, continued to run the war economy for another year. In August 26, just days after the Japanese defeat, by imperial ordinance, the Ministry of Munitions disappeared and became the Ministry of Commerce and Industry once more.
One of the mysteries of the U.S. occupation of Japan is how the Americans allowed the Japanese to get away with such conjuring tricks. After all, Never Again was what the victors had in mind for Japan as well. There, too, 1945 would be Year Zero, the perfect moment to create a new society on the ruins. Clearly some people had to be purged. Kishi Nobusuke was arrested as a Class A war criminal, as was Ayukawa Gisuke. But the institutions they built in Japan were left pretty much intact, even as the industrial stock of Manchukuo was being systematically looted by the Soviet Red Army.
Quite how Japan would rebuild itself was a matter of much dispute. There was a strong current of opinion in Washington that Japan should no longer be involved in heavy industry at all, but should instead specialize in products more in keeping with a quaint Oriental nation: toys, ceramic figurines, silk, paper goods, porcelain bowls, and the like. Cocktail napkins for export to the United States was one helpful suggestion.28 Japanese had different ideas. Just before the U.S. troops arrived, the head of the Mitsubishi zaibatsu wrote a letter to one of his executives talking about a “great hundred-year plan.”29 Even though this phrase, borrowed from the Chinese classics, was not meant to be taken literally, planning was still very much on Japanese minds. A year later, a report drafted by the Japanese Foreign Ministry explained that the age of laissez-faire was over, and the world had “at last entered an era of State capitalism or an age of controlled, organized capitalism.”30
This was close to what some influential American New Dealers, sent out to help General MacArthur remake Japan into a peaceful democracy, thought as well. Some of the early drafts of their plans could have been written by Leninists. Owen Lattimore, a leftist British scholar of China at Johns Hopkins, was influential for a time. He believed that Asians were more interested in “actual democratic practices, such as the ones they can see in action across the Russian border,” than they were in Western democratic theories, which come “coupled with ruthless imperialism.” The only true democracy in China, he claimed to know, was to be found “in Communist areas.”31 Other “China hands” in the State Department looked carefully at the ideas for postwar Japan of Nozaka Sanzo, the leader of the Japanese Communist Party who had spent the war in China indoctrinating Japanese POWs. Factory committees and workers’ groups were supposed to take over from “fascist” bureaucrats to run food distribution and other vital services. Even though this particular idea fell by the wayside, New Deal administrators were serious about land reforms and independent trade unions, and were convinced that the U.S. occupation authorities should “favor a wider distribution of ownership, management and control of the economic system.”32
The New Deal for Japan was rather like Attlee’s plans for Britain. Of course, neither Attlee nor the New Dealers were communists. On the contrary, they were, like most social democrats, very much opposed to communism. A serious concern among the U.S. administrators, including the New Dealers, was that Japanese, driven to extremes by economic destitution, would become susceptible to communist temptations. The solution was to make sure Japan could feed itself as quickly as possible by rebuilding its industrial capacity, undistracted by military interests or big business greed. And the best way to do this was to hand economic policy over to the Japanese with the most experience, to civil servants who knew how to plan for the future, who would put the public good over private interests, whose ideals were patriotic and egalitarian; that is to say, to the largely unpurged bureaucrats in the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Commerce and Industry.
In 1948, Kishi Nobusuke was released from Sugamo Prison without his case ever coming to trial. During his time in jail he had kept up with old friends from the worlds of right-wing politics and organized crime, some of whom shared his cell. In 1949, the Ministry of Commerce and Industry ceased to exist. In its place came the Ministry of International Trade and Industry, or MITI, the most powerful government force behind the Japanese economic miracle of the 1960s and ’70s. In 1957, Kishi was elected prime minister.
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WHEN KOREANS HEARD on the radio that Japan had surrendered on August 15, 1945, the first thing many of them did was throw away their Japanese wartime uniforms—the unsightly peasant trousers for women and the woolen khaki breeches for men. Dressed in traditional white Korean clothes, thousands of people swarmed into the streets waving Korean flags, singing patriotic songs and shouting “Korean independence for ever!” The streets of Seoul were gutted, the electricity had been cut off, there wasn’t enough food, but people were crying with happiness. For the first time in many years, they could openly behave like Koreans again, without being punished for not bowing to images of the Japanese emperor or refusing to go by a Japanese name.
There were some misunderstandings at first. People thought the Soviets were coming, so welcoming parties were sent off to Seoul’s railway station to greet the Russian liberators who never arrived. Similar parties waited in vain at railway stations in other cities across southern Korea, in Taegu, Kwangju, and Pusan, waving Soviet and Korean flags and banners expressing thanks for Soviet help in restoring Korean independence.
Others made for the nearest Japanese Shinto shrines, the main symbols of colonial oppression, and tried to bring them down with hammers, clubs, and even their bare hands, before setting them on fire. First in the northern city of Pyongyang, and then all over Korea, the hated shrines burned brightly through the night to the horror of Japanese who held them sacred.
And yet the Japanese themselves, by and large, escaped from molestation, except in the north where women and girls of all ages were treated by Soviet soldiers as war booty. On the morning of August 16, in Seoul, a Korean resistance hero named Yo Un-hyong, a devout Christian with leftist views and a taste for smart English tweed suits, formed the Committee for the Preparation of Korean Independence with other patriots, including communists just released from Japanese jails. His speech, to thousands of people gathered in a high school playground, was remarkable for two reasons. One was its spirit of generosity: “Now that the Japanese people are about to part from the Korean people, we should let bygones be bygones and part on good terms.” And then there was a strong note of utopianism: “Let us forget what we suffered in the past. We must build on this land of ours an ideal society, a rational paradise. Let us set aside individual heroism and progress together in an unbreakable union.”33
The crowd sang the patriotic Korean anthem, expressing undying love to the nation, set to the tune of “Auld Lang Syne,” which apparently gave some Japanese the illusion that Koreans were bidding a fond farewell to their Japanese masters.
North of Seoul, above what would become known as the “38th parallel,” about a week before the Soviet troops arrived in Pyongyang, an equally venerable left-leaning Christian patriot named Cho Man-sik, known because of his gentle ways and his native Korean garb as the “Korean Gandhi,” also prepared for national independence. Like Yo in the south, Cho had many former political prisoners from the Communist Party in his entourage, but was not yet dominated by them. In both north and south, Korean People’s Committees quickly took over from Japanese administrators. Most members were either communists or moderately left-wing, often Christian, nationalists.
As was true in Europe, east and west, leftists, including communists, had the best patriotic credentials. While the conservative elites in government, business, and higher education had usually collaborated with the Japanese, sometimes grudgingly, sometimes keenly, in the name of modernization or progress, or out of self-interest, resistance since annexation to the Japanese empire in 1910 had a strong left-wing slant. Korean rebellions against their own elites, as well as the Japanese, often had a messianic streak, a mixture of Korean shamanism and Christian influences. Marxist-based resistance against Japanese rule was in many ways a modern incarnation of old peasant revolts against the Korean landowning gentry.
Unity, however, Yo Un-hyong’s fine words notwithstanding, was brittle. It was indeed a rarity in Korean history. The country was torn by regional differences, especially between north and south, as well as by explosive political rivalries. The year 1945 was no different. Even though Cho Man-sik and Yo Un-hyong had a common ideal of Korean unity, the left was riven by factions, and communists were ready to grab power where and when they could. When Yo established the Korean People’s Republic in Seoul, he faced a challenge from the right as well, in the shape of the Korean Democratic Party, led by landowners and other members of the old elite, many of whom had collaborated with the Japanese. There were also various Korean politicians in exile, in China and the United States, who were far from united.
But almost all Koreans, whatever their political views, agreed about one thing. Never Again, to them, meant never to be dominated by foreign powers. These were the fighting words of the declaration of the Korean People’s Republic on September 14:
We are determined to demolish Japanese imperialism, its residuary influences, antidemocratic factions, reactionary elements, and any undesirable foreign influence in our state, and to establish our complete autonomy and independence, thereby anticipating the realization of an authentically democratic state.34
There is a word in Korean, sadae, literally “serving the great,” a term used to describe the traditional tribute paid to the Chinese imperial throne by peripheral kingdoms, such as Korea. In modern times, sadae came to mean groveling to any foreign power, usually to gain advantage over Korean rivals. Collaborators with the Japanese were guilty of sadae. In the “rational paradise,” envisaged by Yo, the shame of sadae would be wiped out forever.
The Koreans never had a chance.
When the U.S. troops finally landed in the southern port city of Inchon several weeks after the Japanese surrender, they had no clue about the country or the aspirations of its people. Lieutenant General John R. Hodge had been chosen to be the man in charge just because he happened to be in the neighborhood—on the Japanese island of Okinawa. His political advisers hardly knew any more about Korea than he did. None spoke a word of Korean. But there was immense goodwill, certainly on the Korean side. Yank magazine reported that “native Koreans” greeted U.S. jeeps, trucks, and reconnaissance cars with “shouts, grins, lifted arms, bows and cries of ‘Hubbah, hubbah!’”35
Despite strict nonfraternization orders, a Japanese-American military intelligence officer named Warren Tsuneishi fell into a conversation with a Mr. Kim, a hotel manager in Seoul. Mr. Kim said: “And we have you to thank for our liberation. Deeply, deeply, I thank you. You have suffered so much to liberate us and make us independent.” Tears welled up in Mr. Kim’s eyes, which made Tsuneishi suddenly feel “ill at ease.”36
By then, the first U.S. blunder had already been made. Before he had even disembarked from his ship, General Hodge received a request to see Yo Un-hyong’s brother, Yo Un-hong, a moderate figure representing the provisional Korean government. The general, suspecting Japanese or perhaps communist skullduggery, refused to talk to him. The next day in Seoul, Hodge announced that the Japanese governor and his entire administration would stay in place until further orders. Koreans were furious and flooded the streets to protest against this slap in the face. Embarrassed by the reaction, the U.S. State Department quickly announced that the Japanese would no longer be in control after all. The Americans would take charge. But since the Americans still lacked sufficient troops, Japanese were ordered to stick to their posts anyway.
This is how Yank described the Japanese surrender ceremony: “Outside the Japanese Governor’s palace in Seoul, a brief retreat ceremony was held around the flag pole. The 184th formed a hollow square of fatigue-clad men, and the 7th division played Americans We. The Jap flag was hauled down, displayed briefly for the inevitable photographers and replaced by the U.S. flag as the band played the U.S. national anthem.” Then, the American troops “marched out the gates of the palace. The Bringers of Justice whom Koreans had welcomed to their ancient Land of the Three Kingdoms had begun their occupation duty.”37
Although the Soviet Red Army occupied Korea above the 38th parallel, Soviet authority was not quite so crudely imposed. A Soviet official remarked to an American reporter that Russians liked the English and Americans, because “they look like us.” But, he continued, “we don’t like the Koreans. We will stay until a suitable stable government has been set up, then we’ll go.”38 General Hodge, incidentally, didn’t like Koreans any better. He regarded most of them as “poorly-educated Orientals strongly affected by forty years of Jap control . . . with whom it is almost impossible to reason.”39
The Soviets stuck to their word, but their idea of a suitable stable government was not what patriots, such as Yo Un-hyong or Cho Man-sik, would have wished. Northern Korea was first run by Korean People’s Committees. People’s Courts were set up to purge collaborators and “reactionary elements.” Officials of the colonial government were ousted, sometimes with considerable violence. Korean landlords, and others who had nothing to gain from revolutionary politics backed by Soviet officials, began to move to the south very swiftly. Cho Man-sik was still in charge of the People’s Political Committee, but this central organ had only limited control over the regional committees. Nor could it stop the Soviets from dismantling and looting Japanese-built factories.
In the south, the American military authorities, who, unlike the Soviets, did assert direct government control, embarked on a policy which would be repeated on many occasions when the U.S. decided it knew best how to bless the natives with good government. Partly out of ignorance, partly out of a not always unreasonable distrust of communist intentions, the U.S. military government relied on conservative members of the Korean elite who spoke English, or, better still, were educated at American institutions. To lead the future Korean government, they brought in a man from the United States who was indisputably a nationalist, but also a figure with staunch anticommunist views: Syngman Rhee, a Christian, educated at Harvard and Princeton. Rhee was not a total unknown in Korea, but he had no popular base there, either. Although he had been regarded by U.S. officials as a nuisance while in exile, a lady from the passport division of the State Department thought Rhee was “a nice patriotic old gentleman.” Her opinion, combined with Rhee’s anticommunist credentials, was thought to be good enough. On October 11, Rhee was welcomed back to his native country by General Hodge, who called him “a great man who has given his entire life to the freedom of Korea.”40
A similar scene took place in Pyongyang three days later, when a relatively obscure Korean guerrilla fighter, a pudgy man in his thirties with a pudding-bowl haircut, who had spent most of the war in a Soviet army training camp near Khabarovsk, was welcomed by the top Soviet commanders as “a national hero” and “an outstanding guerilla leader.” Seventy thousand people had been mobilized to pay tribute to “General Kim Il-sung,” who, in his capacity “as a representative of the grateful Korean people,” delivered a speech written by his Soviet handlers honoring the Soviet army.41
Precisely one week after that the first glimmer of a Kim Il-sung cult appeared in a Pyongyang newspaper, describing heroic exploits that would soon become part of a quasi-religious liturgy celebrating all manner of divine interventions on the Korean peninsula, echoing the messianism of so many political movements in the Korean past. In December Kim took over the leadership of the North Korean Communist Party. But the center of Korean politics was still in the south. There was no question, quite yet, of two independent Korean nations.
Koreans, always conscious of their nation’s history of sadae, had ample reasons to worry at this point. In November 1945, Donald Keene, still based in the Chinese city of Tsingtao, had dinner one night with some resident Koreans. For once, he reported in a letter, there was no contentious argument over Korean independence. “The only subject discussed which led to any controversy was that of Russo-American relations.” Keene found it “very difficult” to persuade his Korean friends that “America and Russia have no quarrel and can get along in a world of peace.” These Koreans, he explained, had “braved severe punishment [from the Japanese] by listening to American shortwave broadcasts during the war,” and so they thought the U.S. should help their country against the Russians. Keene observed, with a hint of impatience: “A solution based on cooperation is viewed as out of the question. All they can see are two different factions in Korea, each striving to win all; cooperation in such a case they would consider betrayal.”42
They were right: the fate of the Koreans would indeed be decided by foreign powers. But there were many more than two factions. At first, at a December conference of foreign ministers in Moscow, it looked as though Keene’s optimism was justified and the United States and the Soviet Union could come to an agreement. A “trusteeship” would be established in Korea under a joint commission drawn from U.S. and Soviet military commands. United States and Soviet authorities would help the Koreans form a provisional government and guide the country towards full independence with the help of Britain and China. This undertaking could take up to five years.
The Soviets had little trouble persuading their Korean allies in the north to back this arrangement. Dissenters were quickly dealt with. When Cho Man-sik, to whom a trusteeship smacked of yet more colonialist meddling in Korean affairs, protested, he was put under house arrest. House arrest later turned into imprisonment, and around the time of the Korean War, he disappeared entirely, never to be seen again.
The situation in the south was more fraught. Almost all south Koreans opposed a trusteeship, either for nationalistic reasons or political ones; conservatives wanted nothing to do with Soviet interference. They could not see how a national government could possibly include the Korean Communist Party. The conservatives, however, lacked popular support. The leftist Korean People’s Republic, despite American efforts to crush it, still had more patriotic credibility. But the issue of trusteeship proved to be its undoing.
When an attempt by leftists and conservatives to form a coalition collapsed, the left became more sympathetic to the idea of a trusteeship. This was followed by chaos: a coup attempt, led by another former exiled nationalist known as “the assassin,” was thwarted; workers went on strike in protest against the U.S. military government. And Syngman Rhee’s conservatives rose as the true patriots, accusing the Korean left of being Soviet stooges—sadae, in other words. The Americans backed Rhee, naturally, and now claimed that trusteeship had been a Soviet plot from the beginning, and that South Korea should set up its own conservative government under the benevolent stewardship of the U.S.—something that might be described, and would be described by what remained of the left in future years, as another form of sadae.
And so the Korean People’s Republic was doomed. What followed was a tragedy. The country would effectively be split into two, with Kim Il-sung in charge of the provisional Communist Party government in North Korea, and Rhee controlling the South. Keene’s Korean friends in Tsingtao soon proved to be more correct than even they could possibly have anticipated. The ghastly Korean War, started by an invasion from the North in 1950, ended in a stalemate after more than two million civilian deaths. Seoul, having survived World War II more or less intact, lay in ruins, as did Pyongyang in the North. The North continued to be ruled by a tyrannical quasi-imperial dynasty, and the South endured decades of military rule.
At the height of the Cold War, in 1961, a staunch anticommunist took power in South Korea by coup d’état. Following the Japanese wartime model of a planned economy under military rule, boosted by Korean zaibatsu operating in tandem with the government, the South Korean economy grew apace. The strongman in question had graduated in 1942 at the top of his class from the Manchukuo Military Academy in Shinkyo, and had been a lieutenant in the Japanese Kwantung Army. In 1948, he was expelled from the South Korean Army for taking part in a plot against Syngman Rhee. His Japanese name during the war was Takagi Masao. His real name was Park Chong-hee. One of his greatest Japanese supporters was Kishi Nobusuke, a fellow veteran of the Manchukuo puppet state.
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UTOPIAN DREAMS ARE DESTINED to end in a junkyard of shattered illusions. But they don’t all end in the same way. And they tend to leave traces. New Jerusalem in Britain foundered on what John Maynard Keynes, the greatest economist of his time, called a “financial Dunkirk.” Keynes had hoped that Britain might have the benefit of U.S. aid—a constant supply of material goods on highly generous terms—under the Lend-Lease Act at least until the end of 1945. That would have given the government some time to stave off bankruptcy. Failing that, it was hard to see where the money would come from to plug the near-catastrophic balance of payments deficit, let alone to pay for Britain’s socialist dreams. Keynes prayed that “the Japanese would not let us down by surrendering too soon.”43
His hopes were dashed by the atomic devastation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, events that prompted the following entry in Harold Nicolson’s diary, describing the reaction of his wife, Vita Sackville-West: “Viti is thrilled by the atomic bomb. She thinks, and rightly, that it means a whole new era.”44
Japan’s war was over in August.
The misery of economic austerity, the rationing of goods that went on longer in Britain than in other countries, the endless queuing for meager services, the sheer dreariness of life, and the postwar fatigue coupled with the realization that Britain not only had depleted its treasury but was also rapidly losing its standing as a major power in the world, all this helped to deflate the spirit of optimism. Even though planning for public housing, education, culture, health, and full employment still went ahead, the nation’s finances were dire, and the enthusiasm of 1945 was quickly dissipated. Two years after the victories over Germany and Japan, the Labour chancellor Hugh Dalton wrote in his diary: “Never bright confident morning again.”45
In 1951 Winston Churchill was back as prime minister. The Labour Party had to wait another thirteen years for a second chance at governing, this time under Harold Wilson, who had been president of the Board of Trade in Attlee’s cabinet.
Similar things happened in other western European countries, where stability and continuity—normality of a kind—promised by Catholic and Christian Democratic parties eclipsed the revolutionary élan of the left. The Dutch social democrats lost power in 1956. General de Gaulle established the French Fifth Republic in 1958. The near hegemony of the Italian Christian Democratic Party began in 1948, much helped by American anticommunist propaganda and financial support. The first social democratic government in West Germany was elected only in 1969. In East Germany, the Social Democrats saw their dreams of working with the communists to build a better antifascist Germany collapse even before the German Democratic Republic was founded in 1949. Germans living in the Soviet zone stubbornly refused to support the Communist Party and much preferred the Social Democrats in 1945. As a result, in the following year, the Soviet authorities forced the east German Social Democrats to merge with the Communist Party, which quickly gobbled them up.
One way of looking at the demise of the noncommunist left in Korea, or indeed Japan, where socialist government lasted for exactly one year, from 1947 till 1948, is to blame it on the Cold War. The U.S. occupation authorities in East Asia may have been fumbling, and often conservative, but the Soviet Union was just as responsible for the debacle of the moderate left. Where the Soviets were in control, in North Korea as much as in eastern and central Europe, socialists were crushed.
Stalin did agree not to stir up revolutions in the American spheres of interest; French and Italian communists were told to forget their dreams of taking power. Indeed, the Italian communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, was rather a middle-of-the-road figure who avoided violent confrontations with conservatives, even though the right was still tainted by Mussolini’s legacy. But the United States and its conservative allies, in East and West, were so suspicious of communist intentions that they did everything they could to keep anything left-wing away from power. This was especially true in states on the front lines of the Cold War, which happened to be Germany, Italy, and Japan. From the late 1940s, Japan, like West Germany, had to be reconfigured as a bastion against communism. The New Deal enthusiasms of 1945 quickly vanished as military rearmament, industrial development, crackdowns on trade unions, “red purges” in the civil service and education, as well as active support of conservative politicians, some of whom only recently had been awaiting trials as war criminals, became the new policy. This so-called reverse course by the U.S. authorities, who had been so encouraging to the Japanese left at the start of the occupation, never ceased to be seen as a betrayal of the idealism of 1945.
And yet Hugh Dalton had been a little too pessimistic when he lamented the end of Britain’s “bright confident morning.” The ecstasy of liberation may have faded, but many of the institutions erected in that bright new start were not dismantled so quickly; some, for better or worse, have lasted to this day. Neither the Conservative governments in Britain, nor the Christian Democratic parties on the Continent, seriously attempted to tear down the foundations of European welfare states, conceived by prewar planners and idealistic members of the wartime resistance. In fact, Churchill’s Tories built more public housing than Attlee’s Labour Party. Many Christian Democrats were almost as suspicious of laissez-faire economics as were the socialists. The western European welfare systems began to corrode around the edges only in the 1970s, and, especially in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, to get seriously dented a decade later. The economies of Japan and South Korea, even compared to continental Europe, are still quite tightly controlled by government planners.
But the main monument of postwar planning is Europe itself, or rather the European Union, rotting and battered, yet still standing. In 1945, most people believed in European unity as a noble ideal. It had always appealed to Catholics, inspired by echoes of the Holy Roman Empire. Frenchmen and Francophiles liked the idea of Europe as a center of Western civilization, centered in Paris, that could stand up to the crass materialism of the United States. Socialists and other economic planners were drawn to Brussels, where essential institutions of the European Union are based, as the capital of a new technocracy. Above all, however, a united Europe would ensure that Europeans would never go to war with one another again. In this sense, at least, so far, the idealism of 1945 has paid off.