We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
WHO WILL WIN THE PEACE?
5
Japanese, the average Jap, hasn't had his country invaded. He hasn't been told of all the American and Australian and Chinese victories. In other words, he has not been defeated mentally. It's not the uniform that makes the enemy — it's his thin\' ing. We are at this moment at the peak of Japan's psychological warfare against the outside world. We've defeated them militarily. But you know the old slogan: A man may be down . . . but he's never out. That's the attitude in Japan today.
Some of our politicians in Washington say it doesn't matter what the Japs think or what they do now . . . that we have the military power and we'll see to it the Japs don't grow into a military nation again . . . and anyway, the new United Nations organization will prevent the Japs from burbling over again.
But anyone who was at the San Francisco Conference can tell you that the new United Nations League of Nations has few teeth in it — and has many "outs" for nations who wish to be belligerent. It must be revised if it's to enforce the peace.
Everything now depends upon how persistent \vz are . . . how cool and intelligent we are . . . how insistent we are in occupying Japan and in eliminating from Jap thinking over the next fifty years the idea that they can come back and do this again. We have given them the right to choose their own system of government within a reasonable time. But for a people whose thinking has been controlled for generations^— for centuries — a reasonable
time is going to mean a matter of more than one generation before the Japanese mentality is capable of accepting freedom of thought and therefore capable of intelligently choosing its own system of government.
But we have one weapon left. We must insist — whether people here think it's Christian or not — we must insist that there be no return to religion in politics, the type of religious fanaticism that has brought the Japs to the peak of emotion that brought on this war. Or we will find — -rather, our children will find — another fight on their hands, a fight with atomic bombs and worse . . . bombs and germs and gas and other horrible instruments of death that will be developed in the next generations.
One very interesting angle to this peace situation is the build-up in Japan by the Japanese Government of the Imperial Crown Prince, a Httle fellow by the name of Aki-Hito, Hirohito's son, about 13 years of age. This indicates one thing and one thing only to me. The Jap overlords expect to permit Hirohito to sign the mperial Rescript for the surrender . . . and then pull a switcheroo on us. They'll do one of two thing. Hirohito will commit Hara-kiri (suicide) in disgrace for having let the people down and not winning the war . . . or Hirohito will relinquish the throne to little boy Aki-Hito, and there'll be a regency, made up of princes of the Imperial family with an officer of the United Nations sitting in as advisor to the little Japanese. Thus