CHINA AND THE US, Part 4

The telegram read: "Its exclusive purpose is to bring the elements pressing for America's entry into the war to their senses by conclusively demonstrating to them if they enter the present struggle they will automatically have to deal with the three great powers as adversaries." As Germany saw it, the purpose was deterrence, not aggression, against the United States. The Anti-Comintern Pact was officially reactivated in 1941 when Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union on June 22. On November 25, the pact was renewed for another five years with Germany, Japan, Italy, Hungary, Spain, Bulgaria, Croatia, Denmark, Finland, Romania, Slovakia, the puppet state of Manchukuo and the puppet Nanjing government of Wang Jingwei in Japanese-occupied China, and the Provincial Government of Free India, a shadow government in Japanese-occupied India led by Subhas Chandra Bose, a militant Indian nationalist who opposed Mahatma Gandhi's passive resistance to British imperialism. All over Japanese-occupied Southeast Asia, from Indonesia to Vietnam to the Philippines, all nationalists who resisted Japanese aggression were "communists". In September 1940, Japan, as a charter member of the Axis Alliance, coerced the Vichy government of defeated France into turning northern Indochina over to Japan. From Japan's perspective, it was a natural demand from a victorious ally to a defeated adversary. The US, through its special relationship with British and French imperialism, retaliated against Japanese expansion into French Southeast Asia by imposing trade sanctions prohibiting the export of steel, scrap iron, and aviation gasoline to Japan from the allegedly neutral and free-trading United States. In April 1941, Japan signed a neutrality treaty with the USSR as insurance against possible attack from the north if it were to come into conflict with British and US interests while expanding toward Southeast Asia. Similar to the German-Soviet non-aggression pact, the USSR entered a neutrality treaty with Japan to avoid being involved in intra-capitalist conflicts and to neutralize potential British-Japanese convergence against the USSR. The Japan-USSR neutrality treaty lasted until August 8, 1945, when the USSR declared war on Japan two days after the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Two months after the signing of the Japan-USSR Neutrality Treaty, when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, Japanese leaders considered breaking the treaty and joining their German ally from the east. A statement by Ribbentrop on the declaration of war on the Soviet Union issued in Berlin on June 22, 1941, began with the following paragraphs: When in the summer of 1939 the Reich government, motivated by a desire to achieve adjustment of interests between Germany and the USSR, approached the Soviet government, they were aware of the fact that it was no easy matter to reach an understanding with a state that on one hand claimed to belong to a community of individual nations with rights and duties resulting therefrom, yet on the other hand was ruled by a party that, as a section of the Comintern, was striving to bring about world revolution - in other words, the very dissolution of these individual nations. The German government, putting aside their serious misgivings occasioned by this fundamental difference between political aims of Germany and Soviet Russia and by the sharp contrast between diametrically opposed conceptions of National Socialism and Bolshevism, made the attempt. They were guided by the idea that the elimination of the possibility of war, which would result from an understanding between Germany and Russia, and safeguarding of the vital necessities of the two people, between whom friendly relations had always existed, would offer the best guarantee against further spreading of the communist doctrine of international Jewry over Europe. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Korea/HI09Dg01.html

Note: http://www.atimes.com/a...